It could have been yesterday that Thomas Brackett Reed (1839–1902), one-time speaker of the House, said this.
What Trump does to your mind—and the sum of human knowledge—was never on better display than in Thursday night’s speech.
It was embarrassingly bad, full of bogus arguments pursuing his manic notion that our elections are corrupt. How many times do we have to listen to this rehash of lies? Here are a few commentaries I found appropriate.
Many have It in for Michael Wolff who has made a career of pursuing and bashing Trump. Still, he gave an unparalleled description of Trump’s major fixation on the stolen election, calling it
an obsessive recitation of numbers, strange things that happened, and fragments of information that have long since lodged in his head. It’s a kind of delirium. The challenge his speechwriters try to rise to is to convert the rantings of a crazy man into more or less organized text. And the world, because he’s the president, has to take it more or less seriously. The most unsettling possibility isn’t that the story is a lie, but that its author experiences it as reality.
Another writer whom I admire, Michael Tomasky, lost no time in savaging this central fiction of Trump’s life:
This man-child with the emotional life of an 11-year-old and an ego that bruises more easily than a three-day-old banana will never stop being obsessed about 2020. In Trump’s mind, Trump can’t lose. It simply can’t happen. (Privately, he has admitted to more than one former aide that he lost, but let’s set that aside for now.) And nothing is ever his fault. Ergo, the election had to be stolen. And he has to “prove” it.
Even though the media has been largely dismissive of the speech, its batch of lies will have consequences. Tomasky again:
In sum: Trump’s motivation may be retroactive, but for the Republican Party and the right-wing media machine, the speech’s greatest utility is proactive. Either way, we’re left with the grim reality that a steaming pile of lies that nearly everyone knows to be lies could end up exerting a chilling influence over the administration of justice in this country and our electoral process.
More about that “steaming pile of lies” from Nia-Malika Henderson of Bloomberg:
With conspiratorial talk of Obama-era “burn bags,” Chinese meddling, supposed schemes by Michigan election officials and manipulated voting machines, Trump laid the groundwork for doubting the outcome of November’s elections, this time in the most high-profile of settings.
This is dangerous and reckless in a democracy.
On Legal AF Michael Popok (and Gavin Newsom) have called for the 25th amendment to take hold. That won’t happen but it should.
the answer to your rhetorical question of how often must we listen to this balderdash is simple — as often as we choose to. my personal hypothesis is that the less we listen, the more quickly it’ll disappear. for someone who thrives on public attention, strategies change as it abates.
He was an unscrupulous failed businessman that never built anything that didn’t fall apart and now he is on track to destroy the credibilidad of our next election and our country (that was the real message) and maybe set the world on a path to oblivion over Irán. He is dangerous and demented.
MY question is why is not every Democrat loudly calling him out as are Chris Murphy, Jon Ossoff, Warnock, AOC, Bernie? HE is unfit to be President. WE do need to listen to how insane T is and to the sane crítics of T and speak out ourselves… and loudly.
“The most unsettling possibility isn’t that the story is a lie, but that its author experiences it as reality.”
I’d say it’s not merely a possibility.
As difficult as it is to believe that Trump believes all of his impossible-to-believe crap, I agree with Peter.