Unhingery and stunts are the norm, yet the GOP continues to support its favorite clown show. We are in the throes of #FatNixon madman theory.
WASHINGTON—Donald Trump made 60 false claims in his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, shattering his old record for false claims in a single speech.
At 2 hours and 2 minutes, Trump’s speech to CPAC was also by far the longest of his presidency. If you’re counting false claims per minute, Star editor Ed Tubb notes, Trump made almost an identical amount to CPAC, 0.49 per minute, as he did in the Pennsylvania rally speech in August at which he set his old record of 36, 0.46 per minute.
At CPAC, Trump ricocheted from his prepared teleprompter remarks into what can only be described as a herky-jerky, stream-of-conscious creepshow — a Willy Wonka ride into the dark, twisted world of Trump’s increasingly haunted and scattered brain. There was sweaty red-faced performance art; American flag leg-humping; bizarre and often shouty anecdotes leading nowhere; insults and obscenities directed at his enemies, both real and imagined; mean-spirited attempts at jokes; unabridged fear-mongering about infanticide and murderous immigrants; bug-eyed facial contortions more terrifying than the Momo Challenge; and other kneejerk outbursts that defy description.
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The normalization of Trump’s unpredictable, spasmodic presidency, as well as the fact that so many of us don’t have the stomach to tolerate two-plus hours of watching him, are perhaps the only reasons why more Americans aren’t gathered as we speak, devising how best to legally remove him from office. For what it’s worth, I propose here and now that this conversation must begin in earnest.
Trump’s obvious mental instability and emotionally erratic behavior has reached a harrowing new depth. They need to be addressed by our political leadership with the same urgency as the myriad investigations into his crimes. This has to begin now before it’s too late. He will clearly do and say whatever it takes to secure his status, and it’s the presidency alone that’s keeping him out of federal prison. He’s at least competent enough to understand this, and he might be crazy enough to do anything to avoid accountability. We’re in new territory. There is no road map, and what we do now will determine whether Trump is the last Trump, or possibly the first of many Trumps along the not-so-lengthy journey into a permanent form of lunatic authoritarianism. It’s time to take his madness seriously now before he levels-up again.
And Trump’s hoaxes are catching up to him.
Last August, President Trump went to Charleston, W.Va., for a “mission accomplished” moment.
He had already boasted to his Fox News fan base that “I’ve turned West Virginia around, because [of] what I’ve done environmentally with coal.” In Charleston, he said that “we are putting our great coal miners back to work” by ending what he had dubbed the Obama administration’s “war on coal” and that, under his leadership, West Virginia had “on a per capita basis one of the most successful GDP states in our union.”
“The coal industry is back,” Trump declared.
Alas, it was an illusion — or, as Trump might put it, a hoax.
Last week, the Commerce Department reported that during the third quarter of 2018 — the period during which Trump took his Charleston victory lap — West Virginia’s gross domestic product grew exactly 0.0 percent. As in, zilch. As in, the worst in the nation.
Quarterly figures are volatile, but clearly, two years into the Trump presidency, both West Virginia and the coal industry remain in bad shape. Coal-plant closures nationwide reached a near-record in 2018, production was off sharply, and U.S. coal consumption hit a 40-year low. Jobs in coal have barely budged, from 51,000 at the end of 2016 to 52,700 today.
and then there’s biggest GOP lie about the “s” word.
Nevertheless, the GOP has a long history of making facile comparisons between ordinary Democratic policy proposals and “socialism” — a history that predates Sanders by generations. Indeed, the socialism smear even predates our modern-day political coalitions, with the Republican Party commonly understood as the economically conservative party and the Democrats as economic moderates and liberals.
The socialism smear shaped the modern GOP. The idea built its coalition, defined many of its objections to the Democratic alternative, and helped form the partisan divide that is so familiar today. The socialism smear targeted the New Deal. It was Ronald Reagan’s weapon against Medicare, Newt Gingrich’s weapon against “Hillarycare,” and the entire GOP’s weapon against Obamacare.
And no matter what policies the next Democratic presidential nominee supports in 2020, that nominee will be labeled a “socialist.”