There are few phrases more oft repeated since
the inauguration of the 45th President than fake news. Few people
utter it more often than conservatives who nearly spontaneously combust in
their effusive efforts to issue a retort to some statement they feel unfairly
debases or attacks Donald The Great.
Last night, #45 asserted that he could be the
most presidential President in the history of the country with one notable
exception. Yes, even our current Commander-in-Chief was able to admit that
President Lincoln was better. What he actually said was this:
“With
the exception of the late great Abraham Lincoln, I can be more presidential
than any president in history.”
This most “immodest” Fantasy was something that
Trump and his bigly appointed brain was able to conceive, despite, having
served only slightly more than six months in the Oval Office, and without
having shepherded one single piece of notable legislation to successful
completion, i.e., not having passed a (significant) bill.
Let me be perfectly clear; Donald Trump is not
without noteworthy accomplishment as President. He is, in point of fact, the
first President in American history to win and assume office with no prior
governing or military experience. While I do not recall him having drawn
attention to that point, if he were to do so, I would be among the first to
co-sign and extend praise for that singular accomplishment. Though, I must
concede, I’m still uncertain whether that says more about his talent,
leadership, skills, and abilities, or the collective malfeasance of an
electorate that unwittingly dismissed a 228 year-old standard, I’m content to
let you be the judge of that. However, that’s not a point of debate; at least
not for this post. Feel free to take whatever side of that particular issue you
choose. My single point of emphasis in raising this particular matter is Mr.
Trump earned kudos for that achievement.
Of course, almost as soon as he took office, he
apparently started looking for the most creative of ways to undermine what
could be one of, if not his most important personal accomplishment as
President, even to this day. The day after his inauguration, he trotted out his
press secretary, Sean Spicer, who immediately began to spray the American
people with Trump Fiction. Spicey, as SNL affectionately dubbed him, posited
that Trump claimed the largest Inaugural crowd on the Washington Mall. Not
surprisingly, this ludicrous assertion was immediately rebutted with historical
film footage and photographs. The Spiceman would ultimately alter this
allegation by amending the claim to include televised and Internet coverage. A
couple of days after Spicer’s initial bovine excrement, Kellyanne Conway,
Counselor to the President, inserted the term alternative facts into the
conversation. If this falsehood were revised anymore, it would need to be
replaced by Senior Advisor to the President, Jared Kushner’s, SF-86 Form.
In an Orwellian, post-truth, newspeak kind of
world, this probably made perfect sense. Otherwise…not so much. As she has
subsequently done with a number of other issues, Ms. Conway maintained that #45
believes his crowd was larger. Apparently, ipso facto, facts, proof, and
evidence, notwithstanding, that makes it true. Alas, 2017 is not 1984, but the
dystopian propaganda model is alive, well, and thriving in TrumpWorld.
Let’s face it. Trump has repeatedly dismissed the knowledge and wisdom of experts while
elevating non-experts who lack relevant experience into important jobs across
the federal government. You might even say, apart from muckraking tweet storms
and rants, pairing high profile posts with incompetent and undeserving
appointees is sort of his stock-in-trade. From Education Secretary to Energy
Secretary, to Housing and Urban Development Secretary, to Communications Director,
to name just four, the President has forced highly successful square pegs of
people into hugely important round holes of responsibility. Mrs. DeVos has no
public school experience, nor any reported or apparent affinity, Rick Perry
didn’t even know the Energy Department, which he famously couldn’t recall as a
candidate, is responsible for our nation’s nukes, Dr. Carson did live near
public housing; kudos for that (tongue firmly implanted in cheek), and Mr.
Scaramucci, whom to his credit, does have TV cred. He has no experience
managing communications. Alternately, what he does have is a Goldman Sachs
legacy. Oh yeah, drain that swamp.
To expand the list of examples for
your consideration, here are a few interesting, if not bizarre examples of
Trump’s philosophy of “Apprenticing” his appointees:
·
Party planner Lynne Patton, who helped plan
Eric Trump’s wedding but had no professional experience in housing, was appointed last
month to head the Department
of Housing and Urban Development’s office for the region that covers New York
and New Jersey.
·
Trump nominated someone who is not a
credentialed scientist to be the
Agriculture Department’s chief scientist. Sam Clovis has described himself as
“extremely skeptical” about the expert consensus on climate change. The post
he’s been tapped for has been occupied by a string of individuals with advanced
degrees in science or medicine.
·
News broke that Trump will
nominate a prominent coal lobbyist,
Andrew Wheeler, to serve as the No. 2 at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Meanwhile,
the Trumpists have actively taken steps to
prevent experts from doing their jobs. The
EPA removed several agency websites in April that contained detailed climate data and
scientific information, including one that had been cited to challenge
statements made by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. One of the Web pages that
was shuttered had existed for nearly two decades and explained what climate
change is and how it worked.
Recently, Trump’s political appointees at the Interior
Department abruptly removed
two top climate experts from a
delegation scheduled to show Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg around Glacier
National Park.
The administration is heavily populated
with people who lack qualifications that would have been prerequisites to get
the same jobs in past Republican and Democratic administrations. It
starts at the top: No one not named Trump seriously believes that the
president’s daughter and son-in-law could have gotten their plum West Wing jobs
if not for nepotism.
Jared Kushner purportedly
proposed to Russia’s ambassador the possibility of setting up a
secret and secure communications channel between Trump’s transition team and
the Kremlin last December, using Russian diplomatic facilities in an apparent
move to shield their pre-inauguration discussions from monitoring by the U.S.
government.
The president, for his part, didn’t want any professionals from
the government, including the Russia expert on the National Security Council,
to sit in on his meeting with Vladimir Putin. The Russians also reportedly recommended
that a note taker be present, but Trump refused.
Trump attacked federal judges who found that
his travel ban was unconstitutional. Then he criticized professional
lawyers in his own Justice Department for pursuing a “watered down”
version of the ban that could withstand judicial scrutiny.
The director of the independent Office
of Government Ethics, a persistent critic of the Trump
administration’s approach to ethics, stepped down last week nearly six months before his term was scheduled to end.
Walter M. Shaub Jr. drew the ire of administration officials when he challenged
Trump to fully divest from his business empire and chastised Kellyanne Conway
for promoting Ivanka Trump products from the White House briefing room.
Trump said he knew more about war than the generals. He cast
doubt upon the medical community consensus that vaccines do not cause autism.
And he said a federal judge of Mexican descent couldn’t objectively adjudicate
a fraud lawsuit against Trump University because of his heritage. Speaker Paul
Ryan called this “the textbook definition” of a racist statement at the time.
Trump’s embrace of
experts and expertise is situational. Candidate Trump often claimed that the
government’s unemployment rate was “totally fiction,” even though the
economists who tabulate it are insulated from political pressure. “Don’t
believe these phony numbers,” Trump said at a rally last year. “The [real]
number is probably 28 [percent], 29, as high as 35. In fact, I even heard
recently 42 percent.”
But when there was a
good jobs report in March, which showed the unemployment rate was 4.7 percent,
then-press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump now believes the same numbers.
“They may have been phony in the past, but they are very real now,” Spicer said.
In a new book entitled “The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established
Knowledge and Why It Matters,” Tom Nichols describes Trump’s victory last November as “undeniably one of
the most recent—and one of the loudest—trumpets sounding the impending death of
expertise.”
“The abysmal literacy, both political and general, of the
American public is the foundation for all of these problems. It is the soil in
which all of the other dysfunctions have taken root and prospered, with the
2016 election only its most recent expression.
In summation, despite the cacophonous cries of right wing
outrage, there consistently appears to be plenty of there, there. To wit, I
submit to you, “Fantasies, Fiction, andFalsehoods: That’s the Real Fake News!”
I’m done; holla back!
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