If there is a single incident that epitomizes that which I think separates Trump from other Presidents, it was this week when the jobs numbers were announced.
The Atlantic wrote:During his presidential campaign, Trump attacked the Labor Department’s official estimates of the number of jobs added each month as “phony” and “total fiction.” He said that Americans were living in a “false economy,” and repeatedly said that he believed that the U.S. unemployment rate is as high as 35 percent. (It is currently 4.7 percent.) Even after Trump won the election, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, repeated this claim at his confirmation hearing in January, saying, “The unemployment rate is not real.” ... But as many expected, Trump has been a bit more upbeat about America’s economy since taking office. On Friday, many eagerly waited to see how Trump would characterize February’s stellar jobs report. He retweeted the Drudge Report’s take, which characterized the latest jobs report as “GREAT AGAIN.”
The White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, didn’t mince words at a press conference Friday afternoon when Eamon Javers, a reporter for CNBC, brought up Trump’s previous doubts about the report’s veracity. “Does the president believe that this jobs report was an accurate and a fair way to measure the economy?” Javers asked. In response, Spicer said, “I talked to the president prior to this, and he said to quote him very clearly. They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.”
Then he gave a hearty laugh, and several of the press corps laughed with him.
This is not funny.
The President of the United States says the he now believes the jobs numbers. There is no difference in the way the data is collected. It was advantageous for Donald Trump is knock the jobs report before the election, but it's okay for him to crow about it afterwards.
This man has such a casual disregard for the truth he will discredit anyone or anything that stands in his way, including a jobs report. He then sends out his Press Secretary to confirm that he didn't believe the jobs report, but now he does. It is the mental flip-flop required for newspeak.
"The great problem of any civilization is how to rejuvenate itself without rebarbarization." - Will Durant "We've kept more promises than we've even made" - Donald Trump "Of what meaning is the world without mind? The question cannot exist." - Edwin Land
Choyo Chagas is Chairman of the Big Four, the ruler of the planet from "The Bull's Hour" ( Russian: Час Быка), a social science fiction novel written by Soviet author and paleontologist Ivan Yefremov in 1968. Six months after its publication Soviet authorities banned the book and attempted to remove it from libraries and bookshops.
I agree that calling Trump ridiculous is a tremendous understatement. His cavalier attitude towards truth is a huge liability for this country and for him, whether he realizes it or not. Yet he seems to foolishly take the attitude that being so inconsistent with what he claims or holds to be true somehow gives him an advantage. It makes it virtually impossible for foreign leaders with whom we have to deal to trust anything he says or promises.
No precept or claim is more likely to be false than one that can only be supported by invoking the claim of Divine authority for it--no matter who or what claims such authority.
“If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.”
― Harlan Ellison
