Harry Litman - Truth or Consequences
May 9, 2017, feels like eons ago in our political and social history—not to mention that my two college-student children weren’t even in high school yet. But my mind goes back to that date every so often because that was when we were first introduced to the reality that a crazy, petty, unbalanced sociopath had become the leader of the free world. That was the day Trump fired James Comey as director of the FBI, doing so with what we now recognize as a typical Trumpian cocktail of viciousness, mendacity, and pettiness. (Remember what a big deal he made about Comey not being able to fly back from the West Coast on an FBI plane?)
At the time, however, it stunned people both in and out of government—to the extent that there was discussion within the Department of Justice about invoking the 25th Amendment, on the grounds that we had a president who was unfit to serve. There was even talk of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein potentially wearing a wire to the White House to record more of Trump’s insane ramblings.
In hindsight, that moment now feels like something out of a quaint, bygone era. For many years now, far greater displays of pettiness and mendacity on Trump’s part have simply passed by as part of the landscape. We have come to absorb Trump’s astonishing pathologies as baked in. The American people, too, seem largely untroubled by the regular displays of insanity emanating from the country’s highest office. And it’s hard enough to register and react to his endless power grabs without stepping back to consider the broader corrosive impact of Trump’s odious conduct.
But we should. And when we do, we should start with the assault on truth—almost certainly the most sustained and shameless in the history of the presidency. Followers of this Substack know that my habit when analyzing Trumpian outrages is to begin with the lies that seem invariably at the core of his maneuvers.
https://harrylitman.substack.com/p/devaluing-truth-makes-america-weak