Rear Adm. Dr. Ronny Jackson became one more casualty this week in a long line of aides serving Donald Trump who disgrace themselves by lying for a man who doesn't understand the concept of objective reality. For all we know, Trump likely looks in the mirror every morning and sees someone who is actually 6'3" and 239 lbs., never mind that Trump's squishy physique doesn't even come close to stacking up against any of the other specimens claiming similar stats.
But more importantly than Dr. Jackson’s dubious height/weight claims was his grander declaration that Trump was in "excellent health." He gushed that Trump had amazing "stamina," was the lucky beneficiary of "incredible genes," and predicted that Trump would "be in good health for the duration of his term, or even a second term." Gosh, how extraordinary for a 71-year-old man who feasts on fast food and guzzles diet cokes as he watches hours of cable TV on end in the White House residence with his door locked. Forget Michelle Obama's "Let's Move!" campaign; Trump's "Let's Sit!" initiative is working wonders!
It turned out cardiologists thought it was pretty extraordinary too based on Trump’s LDL levels (i.e. "bad" cholesterol).
Dr. Maron said he would “definitely” be worried about Mr. Trump’s risk for having a heart attack if the president were one of his patients. Asked if Mr. Trump is in perfect health, Dr. Maron offered a blunt reply: “God, no.” [...]
“Here the issue is, does he have abdominal obesity?” Dr. Topol said. “I don’t care what his height is. All you have to do is look at his abdomen. Abdominal obesity, that’s the machinery for inflammation for the heart.”
In other words, Jackson's claims were the health equivalent of Spicey's visibly laughable assertion about Trump's inaugural crowd sizes. Both men now share the ignominious distinction of sullying their reputations in their very first briefing for the Trump White House.
But this goes beyond more hilarity from the White House. The lying is like a cancer that's aggressively metastasizing from Trump to his staff to Republicans on the Hill and out into the public sphere and it's positively toxic for our country.
Sure, someone like Sarah Huckabee Sanders lies with an alacrity that suggests she's briefing from the comfort of her very own living room. But Dr. Jackson also served as the presidential physician for Barack Obama and George W. Bush and none of us remember any flagrant lies coming from him then. That's because lying to the public wasn't a condition of his service to them.
Trump isn't the beginning of this post-truth trend, he's the product of it—his installation as our head of government was a wholesale takeover by what one study released this week framed as an epidemic of "truth decay." The new research from the Rand Corporation names other times in history when America experienced similar disruptions as it absorbed new forms of media, such as tabloids in the 1880s-1890s, radio in the 1920s-1930s, and television in the 1960s-1970s.
But today's upheaval as digital media invades our lives has been heightened in Rand's estimation by a deliberate blurring of our reality.
“In these previous periods … we were unable to find evidence of disagreement about objective facts,” said [study co-author Jennifer] Kavanagh. “We saw different types of polarization, but not to the extent that we see it now. … What makes it really distinctive and damaging is that it's not just political polarization, but it's also social and demographic polarization. And those lines … are often reinforcing, which means you end up with a very fragmented society.”
No political party has bought into this factionalism and weaponized it more than Republicans. Liberals, at our core, believe in diversity and finding solutions that promote freedom and well being across segments. We believe in a social safety net and health care access for all, for instance, as an expression of how connectedness and community should benefit everyone. We don't all have the same life experiences nor do we align perfectly on solutions, but we have similar goals—in the best of all possible worlds, no one is left behind. These are fundamental principles to liberal voters and Democrats must work to find solutions that appeal to their diverse coalition of constituents.
But Republicans, focusing on a dwindling and far more monolithic demographic, have a simpler path to finding both solutions and messaging alike. And in the age of Trump—a candidate who won by feeding the worst fears of that dwindling demographic—the GOP seems to have given up altogether on appealing to anyone else. They are talking to white voters and, in particular, whites who have a male-centric, paternalistic view of the world. That may be an over simplification, but it's true enough as a working theory. While Republicans may have some incidental support from a negligible number of voters of color, that's not who they're targeting with their message campaigns.
This has produced a party that more and more lies with total impunity. Their audience either isn't interested in their hypocrisy or they won't find out about it because Fox News isn't interested in it. Same difference. And nothing demonstrated that more flagrantly than watching the crocodile tears Republican lawmakers suddenly started shedding this week over reauthorizing the very same health insurance for children of low-income families that they had declined to fund for 111 days straight. (My colleague Joan McCarter has written about this failing on a weekly basis for the past four months.)
As soon as Republicans decided they would squeeze Democrats on the shutdown vote by pitting poor kids against immigrant kids, they were all in.
"Children’s lives are at stake," House Republicans tweeted Wednesday. "It’s time for our friends across the aisle to stop playing games with CHIP funding."
At a Thursday press conference, Speaker Paul Ryan—the guy who had ruthlessly refused to put the bill on the floor for months on end—declared it "unconscionable that Democrats would walk away from CHIP."
Apparently, Ryan suddenly found his orphaned conscience amid the ruins of the GOP’s desperate shutdown battle. As Vox's Dylan Matthews pointed out, "Paul Ryan’s absolute greatest passion in life, the thing that drives him and underlies all of his work in public office, is destroying government programs for poor and low-income people."
And then on Friday, Sen. Orrin Hatch, one-time author of CHIP, took to the floor to shame Democrats.
“Let's quit playing these silly games that are so often played around here,” Hatch scolded. “I don't mind them maybe on bills that are lesser in import and nature, but to do it on the CHIP bill, my gosh, it's incredible to me.”
Incredible is right. In December, Hatch grumbled about the $14 billion price tag for CHIP mere days after pushing through the GOP's $1.5 trillion tax giveaway to the wealthy and major corporations.
But the Utah Senator laid bare his real aversion to CHIP during a Nov. 30 exchange with Sen. Sherrod Brown on the Senate floor.
"I believe in helping those who cannot help themselves, but would if they could," Hatch said, assuring Brown of his allegiance to the bill. "I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won't help themselves—won't lift a finger and expect the federal government to do everything."
Goodness knows what happened to the guy who co-sponsored the original CHIP bill back in 1997 with Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy.
''Children are being terribly hurt and perhaps scarred for the rest of their lives'' when they have no health insurance, Mr. Hatch said.
That guy is long gone, along with a party that ever had any compunction about lying or even a basic sense of decency. The GOP is in free fall now—there is no bottom when the head of your party is always capable of a new low and your constituents don't care what you say or do anymore. At that point, you’re literally rotting from the outside in.