How explicit does Donald Trump have to be when he directs his business empire, negotiates a real estate deal, or sends his Republican minions out to do his bidding? It depends. If the listener is an honest person, apparently they can understand Trump’s code-speak but they don’t translate his words into action. But if the listener is of like mind with (or, of the same kind of character as) Donald Trump the code is something that they’ve never heard of, or if they have heard of it, will never admit to being capable of translating. Or, if they’re honest crooks, they not only understand but they speak it as naturally as if they learned it at their mothers’ knees.
Some Examples
Michael Cohn: Mr. Trump never “directly” told me to lie to Congress. . .
. . .but that Trump would tell him personally and the public that he had "no business" with Russia, even as he was negotiating the Moscow project.
"In his way, he was telling me to lie," Cohen said. —
CNN
James Comey: President Trump ordered me to drop the investigation into General Flynn. . .
. . .Comey recalled that, at that Oval Office meeting, the president said: "I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go."
"I took it as a direction," Comey told the Senate hearing Thursday. "I mean, this is a president of the United States with me alone saying, 'I hope this.' I took it as, this is what he wants me to do. I didn't obey that, but that's the way I took it."
Now, let’s examine how Donald Trump, Roger Stone, and Julian Assange “never communicated” about the Russian hacked emails in re Hillary Clinton — when we see the dots getting connected beneath our very eyes that they did.
Julian Assange: Following Cohen’s testimony today, Wikileaks denies that its founder, Julian Assange ever talked to Roger Stone . . .
Note the careful language “never had a telephone call.”
Roger Stone: On ABC’s This Week, Stone told George Stephanopoulos. . .
“I had no contact with Assange,”
SNIP
“I turned over one direct message to the House Intelligence Committee between the flack for WikiLeaks and I, in which he essentially brushed me off,” Stone said. — Politico
Note the careful language in which one man’s phone call that never happened, becomes a direct message — email, perhaps? — when spoken by another member of the cabal, ensuring plausible deniability.
Michael Cohen: In his testimony today, the nature of the Assange ==> Stone ==> Trump ==> Cohn’s ears undergoes another evolution.
Cohen discussed the details of a phone call he said that he had heard between Stone and Trump, in which Stone told Trump that he had spoken by phone with Julian Assange and an email dump was coming that would hurt the Clinton campaign, according to Cohen.
Who is right here? Who is telling the truth? Well, who is telling the whole truth is not important in this case. What is the truth that matters is the fact that Cohn confirmed the link between the Russian surrogate dirty trickster, Juliasn Assange, to the Nixon dirty trickster Roger Stone, to the president.
Putin: When asked if he supported Donald Trump and helped him get elected. . .
Vladimir Putin says he favored Donald Trump because he talked about bringing the Russian relationship back to normal. . .NBC video clip
And that, as we now know, is code for “lift the sanctions against Russia so that oligarchs can go back to making money that he can launder to keep him in power and enrich himself.”
Keeping all these examples of code-speak in mind, and having the obvious explained to you even when you don’t need it explained because it’s obvious(!), ask yourself:
Why do none of the Republican Congressmen we saw and heard today during the televised hearing understand it? Their minds, like the minds of a three-year-old, insist on only understanding speech literally and pretend ignorance to its meaning in reality. One answer is because it allows them to shout, “Liar!” at the witness with every other breath they draw. Another is it allows them to keep the veil drawn over their eyes, their heads buried in the sand, and their fingers plugged in their ears so that they only can hear themselves say, “Nah-nah-nah,” when truth is told in their presence about the criminal whom they support in the White House.
Code-talkers themselves when they say they’re working for the American people as they dismember Obama Care; that they’re advocates of border security when the advocate ripping children from the arms of their parents; that they believe in hard work as the path for everyone to achieve the American Dream when they put their fingers on the scale to advantage corporate donors; and servants of the people when they make corporations more valuable people than actual people.
See what I did there?
Republicans are superb “code talkers,” because Republicans always employ code-speak when the talk. It’s just that, like the Comey’s of the world, Democrats and liberals really hear them lie.