Sounds like he’s going to try using misinformation to ride two hurricanes into the Oval Office. It will be interesting, and likely outrageous, to hear his reaction to Milton’s landfall. This is what Strongmen do, where truth is concerned.
Following Hurricane Helene, and with
another storm on the way, Trump is falsely claiming the White House is diverting disaster relief aid to unrelated migrant programs. This is false, but Trump, while president,
did repurpose FEMA funds to help finance his hardline immigration policies.
The Republican nominee often insists that his legal troubles are proof of Democratic election interference. But he’s the one who tried to subvert the will of voters in 2020 in the most flagrant attempt to overturn an election in American history.
Trump also accuses the Biden administration of weaponizing justice against him. But the then-president in 2020 went on a late-night Twitter tirade demanding the jailing of his political enemies, warning that Biden shouldn’t be allowed to run for president, and asking, “
Where are all of the arrests?”
Given his attempt to squelch democracy and to steal Biden’s win four years ago, it was rich for the ex-president to warn in Wisconsin on Sunday that if he doesn’t win in November, “Some people say you’ll never have an election again.”
On Monday,
on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, the ex-president – whose administration was famous for “alternative facts” and who uttered thousands of documented lies while in office – made one of his most brazen complaints yet about his Democratic opponent, saying of Harris, “Everything she says is a lie, you know, is a total lie.”
It’s not exactly news that Trump often has a distant relationship with facts. And many politicians fib — an industry of fact checkers is proof of that. Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, for instance, has had to answer for questionable statements about his military record and whether he was in Hong Kong during the crackdown on China’s Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. And the Minnesota governor
made false claims as recently as Sunday about the former president’s stance on abortion and the state of the economy when he left office in January 2021.
But no modern politician has built a presidency on such outrageous untruths as Trump. And the ex-president has never really hidden what he’s up to. In one of the most revealing moments of his political career, before the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City in 2018, the 45th president told his supporters that he was their only reliable source of reality. “
Stick with us. Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news,” Trump said. “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
And the name of the former president’s social media network, “Truth Social,” is a knowing attempt to rebrand falsehood as fact.
