Emperor's Wardrobe Day

Spoiler Warning: I'm going to speak of the ending of a certain fairy tale here, so if it's something you've waited your whole live to read, you'll want to stop when it's mentioned and go read it before continuing on. —kmp

So we're on the same page

In the well-known Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Emperor's New Clothes, the emperor is sold a garment that is said to be invisible to stupid people. No one wants to seem stupid, so no one tells the emperor there is no garment at all. He just walks around naked and everyone tells him how great his outfit is. It takes an innocent child to finally break the spell by blurting out what should have been obvious to everyone all along, but that everyone was afraid to say: the emperor is the stupid one, and they have all been enablers. The story doesn't quite end there, but that's as much as I want to rely on for here.

People have sometimes used the “emperor's new clothes” metaphor for the dark spell that Donald Trump has cast upon the Republican party (GOP). In the early days, I think everyone was looking around expectantly for such a Deus ex machina ending to the otherwise bottomless pit that is Trump's daily sinking to new lows. But no GOP leader stepped forward to play the role of the innocent.

The cancer has mestastasized

Some say there were never any innocent leaders in the GOP. Others say they lost their innocence over time or through specific actions. For our purposes here, it doesn't matter. Actions by single individuals at this point are unlikely to work.

It's commonly suggested that people are afraid to act. I'm sure fear is involved. But too often it's offered not just as explanation, but excuse. People worry they might lose their job, or that they might face physical violence. They cite danger to their families. And I don't disagree there are risks.

But these leaders are the ones we trust to make weighty decisions for our government. They decide who will get medical care and who will not. They decide who will be sent to war. They decide who qualifies for financial aid late in life, or after a storm. They hold the lives of others in their hands every day. And others accept that it's proper for them to do this, at least collectively, because we have a government by and for We The People.

Under our system of government—and I mean as it's intended, not as it's been perverted by recent decisions by a corrupted Supreme Court —those in our government are not special people, better than us. They are just us, charged for a time for performing actions in our interest. The reason, under the original design, that we might trust them with all these life-or-death decisions is that we know those decisions apply to them, as well. They ask some of us to take occasional risks in the name of society, for example, because they know they are subject to those same risks.

I would say there is already a civil war, a battle to undermine and restructure government through mechanisms that are not ordinary governmental consensus process. Wars are often fought with guns, but not always. In The Art of War, written by famous Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, who lived around the 5th century B.C., there is a recurrent theme of minimizing unnecessary resource expenditures, and only resorting to armies as a last resort. “The greatest victory is that which requires no battle,” he says.

Some say that some element of government has always operated behind the scenes in ways that make democratic control an illusion. I argue that some changes have made even that process far worse. Maybe it's just that with each step, it all gets worse, and after a while the exponential nature of the growth of evil is too hard to ignore.

All hands on deck

There's an election coming up. It matters like no other. Voting may not fix everything, but it's important to vote, and to vote for Democracy. That means voting for the Democrats.

I emphasize that I'm not a card-carrying Democrat myself. I'm a political independent. I don't even always agree with the Democrats on policy. But lately, policy is not the issue. Having a democratic government at all is the issue. This is a matter that is beyond policy. It's about survival of our way of life. One of two parties will win: The Republicans, promising to bring Democracy down. Or the Democrats, promising to safeguard Democracy. That choice seems clear to me. It should be to you as well.

To underscore this point, many staunch Republicans, including who've worked closely with Trump in the past, have spoken out in favor of Kamala Harris and the Democrats. former Representative Liz Cheney, for example. And her dad, Dick Cheney, who was George W. Bush's Vice President. John Kelly, Trump's chief of staff and a retired Marine general, recently called Trump a “fascist.”. Thirteen former Trump administration officials signed an open letter backing this. General Mark Milley and other retired generals have issued similarly strong statements in recent days.

Breaking the wardrobe silence

Maybe the dam will finally burst as more and more people come out about the danger. I hope so, but I'm not so sure.

There have been numerous reports that many GOP leaders privately want Trump to lose the election, but aren't willing to say so publicly. Explanations of why vary. Some say they just want to keep their jobs. Others cite threats of various kinds. Romney has spoken about this, for example.

I think the sense is that there is safety in numbers. Going back to the “emperor's new clothes” metaphor, no one is willing to be the singular voice of reason.

But does it have to be one single person?

Maybe someone with a sufficiently large microphone could just designate a day. I'm tentatively calling it “Emperor's Wardrobe Day” when everyone who is afraid to come out individually agrees that they'll suddenly say what they really feel. If everyone plans on the same day, there can be a giant deluge of people speaking the danger, and no one will feel singularly at risk.

It needs to be soon because people are already voting, but also far enough out that people could hear the message and plan their statements. So it really depends on when someone picks up the idea.

Any break in solidarity before the election, explaining the danger, and perhaps most importantly, explaining that attempts to claim there is an election fraud problem are just made up, could be very important to processing of election results. Our election system is not broken in the ways Trump is saying. If he can, even now, be exposed as just making this up, that could matter.

It feels to me like it's worth a try. Everyone is just waiting for there to be a right time. Let's just put one on the calendar.

Hallmark, if you're listening...

 

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Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

Also, if you're looking for more reading, these recent pieces by me may offer additional insight:

• Vance Notice
• Political Terraforming
• American Dictatorship
• The Pace of Political Evil

There's also my recent poem The Fraud Who Stole Freedom, which covers many of the same issues as does Vance Notice, but in a hopefully-more-entertaining way.

The graphic was produced by abacus.ai's ChatLLM using Claude Sonnet 3.5 and Flux.1. The prompt was: «draw a grayscale image of sad old donald trump wearing just a barrel, holding up a hand-lettered cardboard sign that says "Will dictate to stay out of prison."» It inroduced the misspelling of “dictate” and I decided to just keep it.

Vance Notice

It's in the news that Trump is “exhausted,” and that's supposedly why he's been canceling appearances.

Maybe.

There's a lot of attention paid to him seeming to nod off. But, you know, he's been doing that all along. and it's never been portrayed by him or his team as exhaustion. What is happening more often are incoherent rambles, which some of the media has tried to paper over. And that has led to accusations of “sanewashing.”

Numerous stories have suggested that his aids are hiding him. Such a story in The Wrap quotes political commentator Tara Setmayer from an appearance on MSNBC's The ReidOut as saying, “The more he’s out there, the more people are repelled by him, and his advisers are smart enough to know that.”

The Mental Decline Scenario

Let's consider, just for a moment, the mental decline hypothesis. We have two reasons to take this seriously. One is that he accused Biden of it, and he's long been accused of projection. But the other is that there's a lot of evidence that his campaign rallies are getting weirder and weirder, to the point where Harris is straight out suggesting that people watch or attend her opponent's rallies, just to see it for themselves.

Consider, for example, the recent town hall that he turned into a “musical fest” playing his Spotify favorites list after declaring “Let's not do any more questions, let's just listen to music. … Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?“ Yeah, at a town hall. Why would anyone expect questions there? Surely they just came to hear Pavarotti sing Ave Maria.

It probably won't surprise anyone that some artists have threatened legal action over the unauthorized use of their music. No, I didn't think so.

People, including medical experts, have credibly accused him of mental decline, not just because of this event, but for other reasons as well.

Around the same time as this musical incident, a story ran on CBS News saying that “More than 230 doctors, nurses and health care professionals, most of whom are backing Vice President Kamala Harris, are calling on former President Donald Trump to release his medical records, arguing that he should be transparent about his health ’given his advancing age.’” Of course, some will point to these being Harris supporters. But if you were a doctor alarmed about the mental health of one of the candidates, would you be still voting for him? So it's not clear that this statistic disqualifies those people. And it's not helpful that there isn't transparency of his medical records, which we've asked of other candidates and Presidents.

Prison Looms

But Trump is pending sentencing on the hush money case. And there are several other trials pending as well. It doesn't reliably work his favor to drop out of his candicacy. And it really doesn't help Vance either, because the GOP made the argument that if Biden dropped out, that invalidated the ticket. They suggested Kamala had never won a Presidential primary. Vance has never won a Presidential primary either. Both have been Senators. But Kamala has been on a winning ticket in the general election, and Vance has not. Would that sway GOP voters? Maybe not. OK, almost certainly not. But it's a bad look. It might influence some independents.

It's pretty clear that Trump's path to steering clear of jail is to get elected, turn the US into a dicatorship, and cancel anything that looks like a prosecution. And it's pretty clear that anyone else claiming to be a GOP leader is really just a sycophant. They want the power of a Republican presidency at all costs, and this is as close to “all costs” as one could really imagine. It may cost us the survival of democracy, and perhaps the survival of the human species on planet earth. But they want power that badly, so they're on board with what they hope is the Trump juggernaut.

After Election

If elected, he might serve 4 years and then gracefully step down. The Constitution would not permit him to run again. What are the chances he wouldn't try to overcome that?

He might live that long, but he's old enough that he could die of poor health during that time. I wouldn't bet money on it, but I also wouldn't bet money against it. Who ever knows?

But is he mentally agile enough to lead for four years? Again, we don't have the advice of a doctor who's examined him to really say. Though we do have reason to think we might never get the full story .

Reporters often mention that, behind the scenes, Republicans don't like or respect Trump. It seeems they just won't go on the record about it. Mitt Romney comments on this in his book. In a recent biography of Mitch McConnell, the book's author says the same of McConnell. The common theme seems to be that they recognize Trump as their ticket to power.

A Second Trump Presidency

It's no secret I'm hoping sanity prevails and that Harris is elected. But let's consider the case that Trump is.

Do the Republicans still need him? My guess is that even they would see strong grounds to remove him, sooner or later. Probably sooner, given that he toys with the idea of dispensing with the Constitution. After all, both the Impeachment Power and the 25th Amendment need the Constitution to still be in play.

I'm guessing you worry I'm exaggerating, but Newsweek fact-checked one such claim in 2023 and found Trump had indeed called to suspend the Constitution. Moreover, there is his claim that he wouldn't be a dicator “except for day one.”

Here's the thing, though. There is no procedure for becoming a temporary dictator. If he can pronounce himself a dictator on Day One, and get away with it, he can do it any day. At that point we'd just be relying on him to use self-control on all other days. Is that really something we can expect of him?

So let's take a moment to assess where we are, shall we? It's day one. The President wants to be a dicator. The same guy whose staff didn't think they could show him in public during the end of the election for fear people would see he was, perhaps, faltering mentally. At this point, the Constitution has a 25th Amendment. But he's planning strong-arm tactics to make the Constitution less effective. Republicans want to have power, but is that even meaningful in what's to come in this scenario? A few may imagine they'll have posts in a coming dictatorship, but I think most haven't thought that far ahead. The power most of them seek still relies on the Constitution.

After Trump's Presidency

But whether on Day One or some day soon after, I think its sufficiently possible that the 25th will get used that we dare not overlook that fact in considering the political consequences of this election.

In plain terms, the ordinarily-rare issue that a Vice President might take over seem unusually possible.

In even plainer terms, we had better be seriously contemplating the significance of a President Vance.

For example, if Vance becomes Acting or Actual President, would the world return to normal? I think not. I think it will just trade one source of dangers for another.

If you're thinking otherwise, perhaps you have missed a recent episode of The Rachel Maddow Show (TRMS) on MSNBC. Lately she's only doing it Monday nights, but it's really essential viewing. Set your DVR. In this case, I'm referring to an episode where she said this of JD Vance (and offered video to back up her claims):

«JD Vance says not only do conservatives need to, in his words, “wake up” but what they need to wake up to is the fact that most of American life and culture should be, in his words, “ripped out like a tumor.”»
  —Rachel Maddow on The Rachel Maddow Show (Sep 30, 2024)

Maddow goes on to say:

«When JD Vance says stuff like “we're in a late Republican period,” which is something he says all the time, he doesn't mean anything about the Republican Party, he means we're at the time right before the Roman Republic collapsed. And what happened after the Roman Republic collapsed? Well—whoo!—a dictator, Caesar, came in—and wasn't that better?»
  —Rachel Maddow on The Rachel Maddow Show (Sep 30, 2024)

The piece makes a decent case that he's not only comfortable with, but excited about, the idea of America having a dictator. Watch it in its entirety. Outtakes here cannot do it justice. It's well-researched and compellingly told. Typical Maddow.

There's so much more to be said from here, but I'll only sketch it. Project 2025, for example. It's a product of the Heritage Foundation, and Vance has in some forums tried to distance itself from it, as has Trump, but as Simon J. Levien, a political report for The New York Times, writes in an article titled What to Know About JD Vance and Project 2025:

«Mr. Vance … has connections to Project 2025 and its authors. Vance wrote the foreword for a book by Kevin Roberts, who oversaw Project 2025. “In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon,” Mr. Vance wrote in the foreword for “Dawn’s Early Light,” a forthcoming book by Kevin D. Roberts, the leader of the Heritage Foundation and the man who oversaw Project 2025. The book was set for publication in September, but after Project 2025 drew national scrutiny, that was postponed until after Election Day.»

The ACLU also offers a summary of Project 2025's dangers. And the Center for American Progress (CAP) offers a useful comparison with how other dictatorships have taken hold.

It may also be worth a look at Timothy Snyder's book On Tyranny.

This long nightmare has seemed to be about Trump. With him lately ailing, maybe you thought it was over. But if Vance takes over, and that seems likely if the election goes “Trump's way,” this could just be the start of something even worse.

My point here is that you can't say you didn't know.
You've been given Vance notice.

 

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Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

If you'd like to read or listen to this warning in Seuss-style poetry form, check out my recent epic poem The Fraud Who Stole Freedom.

You might also like these recent posts by me:

• Political Terraforming
• A to-do list for repairing US democracy
• American Dictatorship
• The Pace of Political Evil

Also, although I count myself a political independent, not a Democrat, while democracy is hanging in the balance, I'm voting all-blue. If you're a US Citizen able to vote, I'm recommending the same for you. Please not sit it out. Please do not vote for a third party. Such actions leave the outcome to chance, which could have dire consequences this time around. This is not a normal election.

For the sake of Democracy,
please vote Democrat in 2024.

The graphic of Vance with the 25th Amendment in the background was created by me using a screenshot of text of the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution that I typeset in LibreOffice with a mix of Papyrus and Goudy Old Style fonts, then overlaid with the public domain photo of Vance from Wikipedia, and blended with layer effects using Gimp.

The Pace of Political Evil

US politics has lost its civility. Civility kept progress on the Conservative agenda slow, and it created time and opportunity for opposition response. In recent years, this pressure has intensified in speed and scope, making it hard to respond effectively in any civil way.

Trump is not the only player in this. Others, working patiently over decades, laid a foundation that was ripe for the arrival of someone like him. The system has been weakened over time. Gerrymandering, the Citizens United ruling, and the stacking of the Supreme Court are examples.

But Trump has been a definite innovator in the sociopathic governance space. His two primary innovations, either one of which would be sufficient to explain the reverence of the rich and power-hungry, have been:

1. 

   The outright shredding of shame, and the important social safeguard that shame had previously provided. Prior to this, there were a great many things no politician would dare try because of fear of being found out; Trump showed that fear to be a waste of time. Far too many voters are willing to turn a blind eye to shameful behavior that comes from a politician that otherwise serves them, which has allowed the GOP to very rapidly morph into the Party of Machiavelli.

2. The observation that massive numbers of voters don't check truth or consistency. Prior to this, politicians feared injuring their own supporters, which led to a natural reserve in how nasty a policy could be; Trump has shown that it's a productive strategy to create policies actively hurtful to one's own base, who will notice the pain but not bother to find out where it comes from, preferring to just be blindly angry, without direction, and to just wait to be told by tribal leaders who they should be angry at.

The consequences of these shifts are legion, far too numerous to discuss here in detail, but they include corrupt behavior to acquire and keep office, and the open incitement of and condoning of political violence, even to include outright insurrection. These also include ever more blatant acts of judicial activism by a questionably seated and plainly corrupt majority of the Supreme Court. Openly scornful of any suggestion that they be bound by an ethics code, they are apparently bent on taking a buzz saw to long-standing readings of the Constitution in favor of uglier ends—probably to include the present trend of the Republican party toward White Christian Nationalism.

The basic problem is that the founders did not anticipate this speed and scope. The safeguards they built in were few, and the presumption was that the system would be self-correcting, patching small holes on a one-off basis as they came up. The Supreme Court was designed for perhaps a challenge or two per Presidential term. Even if it was still functioning in a properly ethical way, it would not be up to the present onslaught of challenges—as I had warned about in a tweet on ex-Twitter a month before the 2016 election:

"Trump…involved in a startling 3,500 legal actions".

Visualize 3,500 Constitutional challenges by a #bully #President flexing his muscles. https://t.co/6HffNXKA7y

— Kent Pitman 🌎 (@KentPitman) October 13, 2016

 

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Author's Note:

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The graphics were created at abacus.ai via its ChatLLM facility.

The prompt for the paperwork graphic, created by FLUX.1 was "create a black and white graphic that shows someone with a xerox machine that is rapidly spewing out legal documents in the direction of a model of the supreme court". I'm not sure what I expected as a result of that. A smaller court building, for one. But I guess this was sort of responsive.

The prompt for the shame graphic, created by DALL-E, was "create a simple black and white graphic sketched graphic of a man whose face is vaguely like donald trump, but feeling shame with one hand over his face and the other hand extended into the foreground, palm up and out, in a stop gesture intended to hold nearby people at bay." You can see it ignored parts of my request.

Kamala uninterviewed?

This will be a gripe of short-lived relevance, but I still wanted to say it out loud because there are other themes implicated that have more enduring nature.

About the Harris candidacy, I keep seeing:

“Harris has yet to give an interview…”

As if that's some kind of gotcha that shows weakness, fear, or lack of validity.

She's not exactly hiding. Barely more than a month ago, she was advocating for Biden. All of a sudden, she is thrust into a situation that was not anticipated. She has done extraordinarily, being at once a Vice President and a candidate, charged with assembling a team, approving preliminary messages, selecting her own Vice President after numerous interviews, syncing up on messaging with Walz, preparing presentations for the convention, and surely meeting with a zillion people who have competing theories of how she should spend her very limited time.

I don't know about you, but that's more than I get done in a month.

Not to mention the fact that her job up until now has not been to make policy but to support Biden's policy. It will probably take her a little while to work out how to articulate a strategy of her own, and how to present it in a way that is respectful of the fact that she's still Biden's VP.

All to say it doesn't look to me like ducking anything. It looks like walking straight into a firehose. While it will be interesting to hear an interview, I write off any delay as saying there are only so many waking hours in a day. Few people have assembled a campaign at all in that time, much less one with this amount of momentum. I think she's doing great.

But it's equally reasonable to note that an interview is really not going to shed any more light. It's a form of outreach to be sure, but there aren't secrets that are likely to be uncovered in that way. The people who are against her are hoping there will be a gotcha moment, but I think her policies to the extent that she has them formed yet, are on display. At this point we are trusting values, because that is what this election is about.

I am not a Democrat, but an Independent. By that I mean that I don't vote on anything or anyone just because I'm part of some tribe, I think things through. And I would be writing this same essay if it was Liz Cheney running and she had not sat down for an interview. I know enough about her and her values from what she stood up for in the Jan 6 hearings to know Democracy would be safe under her. I would be unwaveringly saying the same thing as I'm saying about Harris right now: democracy is on the line, and that matters more than anything.

So if you know anything about me, and there's no reason you should—I'm just a random guy with an opinion, you know that climate is in fact my top priority. And that I disagree with Kamala on some really material things about climate, mostly urgency. And she used to be against fracking and seems to have moderated. That's not great. But it doesn't change my unconditional support for her one iota.

Because if Trump is elected, there will be…

• no discussion of science,
• no chance for climate at all,
• no civil rights,
• no protective government agencies,
• no part of government, nor property entrusted to it, that is not for sale,
• no safety for anyone gay,
• no safety for women,
• no safety for people of color,
• no freedom of religion,
• no dignity for the elderly,
• no respect for injured or fallen heroes,
• no respect for people with disabilities,
• no real safety for anyone who is not straight, white, male, young, and rich,
• no safeguards for the environment,
• no workplace safety,
• no employment safety and fairness standards,
• no sane public health policy,
• no chance for fair elections in future elections.

Whatever I might think about Harris—or even Cheney in my hypothetical—and her policies, seems small compared to worrying that democracy is secure. And, believe me, I would disagree with Cheney way more than Harris. But my point is that small partisan matters are not the issue right now, and even large partisan matters are dwarfed by the threat to democracy. Partisan reasons are not the reason to cast a ballot one way or another. Not this year.

Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy. There should be no higher priority than making sure he does not become US president.

We'll be lucky if the cancer that Trump has planted does not cause a bunch of people to challenge election results without basis and then have the morally compromised Supreme Court that he has stacked approve such antics, completing a procedural coup.

Serious damage has been done to our democracy, and it is limping along as it is. A strong showing for Harris and a Democratic Congress is a chance to have enough time to mend some things.

Otherwise, it's probably game over for US democracy, and a short road from there to game over for the world against climate change as petro-state dictators gain an edge at a terribly bad time.

Any attempt to suggest that Harris needs to sit down and discuss something in more detail completely misses the point and makes no sense to me.

• Democracy, not autocracy.
• Hope, not fear.
• Joy, not anger.
• Acceptance, not division.
• Lawfulness, not lawlessness.
• Constitution, not bullies.

Those are the things Harris stands for, and you aren't going to learn anything materially different from that in an interview. It'll be quite interesting to hear what she says in an interview, but she is not derelict for not having sat down for an interview. We have enough information for now, so let's cut her some slack. She should be getting credit for managing priorities well enough to give us the important things first. That bodes well for the future.

 

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Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This essay originated as a post on Mastodon. It has been edited to fit the richer format of this venue, and somewhat edited to include additional content not in the original post, so you could think of that post as an initial draft.

The image was created by so-called “generative AI” via Abacus.AI and its interface to the FLUX.1 facility via a chat interface. I'm not sure how happy I am about the idea of these tools, but find myself needing to learn how they work, so I figured I'd use this as an experiment to see how they work. The prompt I used to get this graphic was:

“Make a graphic in black and white that shows, in silhouette form, two people sitting in comfortable chairs, facing each other. One of the people, the person to the right as we're looking on, is Kamala Harris in a pantsuit, and the other, to the left as we look on, is a generic news person doing the interview. There should be a coffee table between them, with a coffee cup on each side so that each would have something to drink if they needed it. Assume that the two are being recorded for television, so it is not necessary for there to be a visible microphone or any note-taking material.

And yes, if you're paying attention, it didn't take all of my instructions. The result was not a silhouette, for example. It just confirms that these tools are not as good as people often say. They make mistakes. Sometimes really conspicuous ones. But this was the best I got after several attempts, and was good enough for this very flexible case. I still am not a big fan of these tools, both for their environmental footprint and because they confabulate freely. They don't really understand, just mimic. That it drew anything at all suggests there were probably other things humans had done that were close enough that it could crib from them. But I'll gripe in more detail about all this on another day.

The Sudden Importance of Truth

Out of Context and Out of Line

It is disingenuous and preposterous to nitpick Tim Walz over remarks that weren't even about him but about gun availability. It's doubtful he intentionally lied, hoping to mislead folks unchecked—he's a teacher. He knows that would never stand. But we all say things that don't come out exactly right, and if it's not our focus, we press on.

He did, after all, carry weapons. And there was a war going on. And his remarks here are not trying to suggest he's a war hero, they're trying to say he has sufficient experience and perspective to understand the difference between military need for assault rifles and civilian needs.

It's legitimate to debate the correct interpretation of the Constitution. Some people think that the Second Amendment is a right of the people to have sufficient firepower that they can take down an out-of-control government. I don't happen to agree with that. Taken seriously, it would amount to a right of private citizens to have nuclear weaponry, so I think the idea that citizens can keep parity with the government, if that's what it ever meant, was lost long ago. But it's a legitimate policy debate we could have. Debate Walz on that, if you want to, because that's what he was speaking to. This was not a discussion about his military record. It merely mentioned it in passing, in shorthand, to give context.

Likewise on the issue of when he retired, plenty of people retire at 20 years. It was his right to retire. He received an honorable discharge. That's really all that needs to be said.

No one's decision to retire after 24 years needs to be questioned. Full credit to Walz for answering graciously pointing this out.

Rules of Engagement

And, just to be clear on the debate rules here, what is the standard for misstatements? How many times does a candidate have to repeat a single ill-shaped, questionably worded, or not-quite-true statement, much less a Big Lie, in order that their honor is put in doubt or their campaign be disqualified?

Asking for a few friends (the US).

Because if there's a sudden renewed interest in the truth here, that is the real story. I was starting to think truth had atrophied from disuse.

Due Diligence

You know where I'm going. The Washington Post estimated 30,573 false or misleading statements by Trump while in office. Is that disqualifying? Is anything like that alleged of Walz?

Are we just talking military issues, JV? Should we talk bone spurs?

Exceptional Vision

Perhaps we should revisit Trump's later remarks about 9/11, as described in an ABC News article (bold mine for emphasis):

Trump Tower is located on 5th Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets, a little more than four miles away from ground zero.
…
“I have a window in my apartment that specifically was aimed at the World Trade Center, because of the beauty of the whole downtown Manhattan. And I watched as people jumped, and I watched the second plane come in,” he said then. “Many people jumped, and I witnessed that. I watched that.”

And from that same article (again, bold mine):

At the time, he noted “many of those affected were firefighters, police officers, and other first responders,” and then claimed, “and I was down there also, but I’m not considering myself a first responder. But I was down there. I spent a lot of time down there with you.”

And from an article linked by that one (bold mine):

Trump's claim that he saw television reports of people in New Jersey celebrating the attacks has been discredited. He stood by that claim on the campaign trail last year.

There is probably more I could say if The Washington Post’s “30,573” number is even remotely right. (Will we be holding them to the same precision as you want to hold Walz to, or the relaxed precision you reserve for your boss?)

But maybe we could pause here for a response.

 

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Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This essay originated as a thread on the ex-bird site. It has been edited to fit the richer format of this venue, and expanded to include additional content not in the original thread.

Collusion illusion allusion elusion

In response to a tweet by @Limericking, I wrote this limerick in a tweet:

By treasonous channels he learned
His opponent was soon to be burned.
Though sad he’d not led it,
He lusted for credit.
And with that collusion, votes turned.

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