Donald Trump is a different kind of beast. It’s been clear for some time that he’s completely untethered from the truth, and that his army of sycophants is dutifully orbiting Planet Bullshit right along with him. Trump tends to engage with the truth the same way he addressed COVID-19: just ignore it, the thinking goes, and it will disappear on its own. Or, like mixed vegetables, you can hide it in your hulking mound of mashed potato lies so your gape-mouthed troglodyte horde will never even know it’s there.
I sometimes wonder what it feels like to have no shame and absolutely no fealty to the truth. I don’t know about you, but I’d sure like to bask in Walter Mitty-like fantasies about myself—like how I’ve won prestigious-sounding, decidedly nonexistent awards and how Madonna was begging to date me at the height of her fame—but I’m constrained by consensus reality and the fact that I didn’t inherit $413 million from my dad.
Well, as COVID-19 proved to Trump that there’s also a limit to his lies, his latest cranial methane blast may end up being a comeuppance as well.
You probably saw that Donald Trump has decided to sue Facebook, Twitter, and Google for supposedly violating his First Amendment rights ... by enforcing their own terms of service. As lawsuits go, this one is pretty embarrassing. If lawsuits could walk up stairs with toilet paper stuck to the bottom of their shoes while their flaccid, flaxen shocks of corn husk hair decamped from their helmetless Darth Vader heads, that’s what this cosmic yak shart of a lawsuit would be doing right now.
Unfortunately for Trump, lawsuits trigger depositions, and it’s very unlikely that he’ll want to sit for another one of these—especially since his Twitter and Facebook bans were directly tied to his actions on Jan. 6.
And people are noticing! First up, veteran broadcaster and frequent Trump critic Keith Olbermann:
For the nontweeters:
This is the dumbest thing Trump has ever done. It’s wonderful. I remind you from personal experience that when you sue somebody you have to give a multi-day deposition on anything relevant to the topic … in this case, like your role inspiring the 1/6 Coup
Not to be outdone, John Dean, the former White House counsel who famously flipped on Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal, quoted Olbermann’s tweet, making it clear that he’s very much looking forward to Trump’s deposition.
For the nontweeters:
This should be a nationally televised deposition…. Please schedule it next week. Don’t move to dismiss, which would be the normal move. Make him deal with the trap he created for himself. He will lose on the merits!
Of course, Trump’s clear dilemma is that one gets sworn in for depositions, so he can’t freestyle (i.e., lie his ocher arse off) like he normally does. He has to switch gears, and luckily, we have documentary evidence of how a Trump deposition would likely go.
Last September, Mother Jones obtained a copy of Trump’s deposition in the Trump University fraud case. If you’ve ever had a one-year-old with colic and chronic diaper rash pee in your face while screaming at you, you can probably skip this video. If not, it’s more than a little revealing.
Here’s Mother Jones’ summary of this squirmy spectacle:
Trump sat for this deposition in Trump Tower on December 10, 2015. The video shows him parrying with the lawyer for the plaintiffs, Jason Forge, over various issues, including false statements made by Trump University employees, and Trump’s own memory. Trump at one point griped, “It’s the most ridiculous lawsuit I’ve ever seen.” He claimed not to remember having boasted that he possessed one of the best memories in the world and repeatedly said he could not recall matters related to the case. He downplayed false and misleading statements presented by Trump University instructors as merely “hyperbole,” refusing to label them “false.” He even disavowed a passage from one of his own books in which he had assailed educational institutions for committing “fraud.”
Of course, Trump’s lawsuit has little chance of succeeding. It’s almost certainly a scam intended to separate foolish people from more of their money, and experts have universally panned it, claiming it’s a nonstarter. First and foremost, the First Amendment doesn’t apply to private companies.
There also seems to be an ulterior motive here, one that has nothing to do with a devotion to the Bill of Rights.
But if Trump does go forward with the suit—and he might, considering how stubborn, narcissistic, and stone-cold stupid he is—he’s likely in for a world of hurt. Attorneys are not like OANN correspondents. They ask probing questions, and Donald Trump is among the most probe-able tubs of goo in the whole wide world.
So bring it on. There aren’t many things I can do faster than Donald Trump can lie, but popping popcorn kernels happens to be one of them.
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