The government is trying to turn Trump's lies into truths
By Dana Milbank
They say you can fix anything with duct tape. But using it to repair a presidency?
That can get a little sticky.
The Post’s Katie Mettler recently caught President Trump in one of his frequent fabrications, this time his oft-repeated claim that migrant women are commonly bound and gagged with tape (alternately duct, painter’s or electrical, in Trump’s telling) across their mouths and smuggled across the border. Baffled experts called the claim “divorced from reality.”
And there it would have ended — had the Trump administration not sent the Border Patrol in search of duct tape.
After The Post’s report, a senior Border Patrol official, apparently acting on behalf of Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan, emailed an urgent request to agents seeking “any information that you may have (in any format) regarding claims ‘that traffickers tie up and silence women with tape before illegally driving them through the desert from Mexico to the United States in the backs of cars and windowless vans.’?” The email, reported Sunday by Vox, linked to The Post’s article.
That Trump told a lie is unremarkable. That government officials continue to use federal resources in vain attempts to turn the president’s lies into truth is unacceptable.
Such efforts began almost as soon as Trump was inaugurated, when he called the acting director of the National Park Service for photographic evidence supporting his false claim that attendance for his inauguration had set a record. It continued with his forming of a since-disbanded presidential commission to substantiate his false claim that there is widespread voter fraud in the United States.
In October, Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker detailed several instances of “the federal government scrambling to reverse-engineer policies to meet Trump’s sudden public promises — or to search for evidence buttressing his conspiracy theories and falsehoods.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-government-is-trying-to-turn-trumps-lies-into-truths/2019/01/28/1ad3a89e-2349-11e9-ad53-824486280311_story.html?utm_term=.5cf789c08073&wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1
= new reply since forum marked as read
