Yesterday was a big day in DC! We finally got to see the secret Senate healthcare bill that, according to some, is even worse than the House bill President Trump called “mean.” And in what was surely not an attempt to distract from an impressively unpopular bill, the president finally admitted that he doesn’t have any tapes of his conversations with fired FBI director James Comey.
This admission pretty much confirms the suspicion that Trump just says or tweets whatever random thought is convenient at a given time. It’s clear he doesn’t think at all about whether statements might be considered an obstruction of justice, or witness intimidation, or maybe betraying allies by spilling their intelligence secrets to the Russians, or just flat out false.
Which brings us to today’s subject. At his campaign rally on Wednesday night, Trump continued his bad fibbing habit, by one count telling his audience a total of 18 lies during a one-hour speech. Although he told the crowd it wasn’t a campaign rally, the event was “advertised, sponsored and organized by his campaign committee.” One of the most obvious falsehoods: calling the Paris Agreement “binding.” It might behoove some interns to check the White House transcripts. Not even a month ago, the president described the Agreement as “non-binding” during his withdrawal announcement.
At the rally, Trump also brought up the idea of covering the proposed-but-likely-never-to-be-funded U.S.-Mexico border wall with solar panels to offset the cost of building it. Since we know he just says stuff to get a rise out of people, we’re obviously reluctant to take the idea seriously. Others have looked into the numbers and found out that panels won’t pay for the wall. Shocking, we know.
Yet the question remains: besides the obvious troll, why would Trump even suggest such an idea?
Maybe he really wants the wall to be beautiful, and thinks panels would give the barbaric prison-wall-for-the-entire-nation a spiffy space-age sheen. Maybe he really does care about the funding and thinks that if the panels could provide a few million in revenue, it’ll persuade Congress to write the multi-billion dollar check to build the wall. Or maybe he just wants to use the panel proposal as a counter to the fact that he’s basically hired the fossil fuel industry to run his administration, while firing independent experts who provide guidance on how to keep Americans safe.
But Trump can’t really believe slapping solar panels on a giant border wall is a way to get the general public to support a fundamentally un-American monument to exclusion, hate and xenophobia. Solar panels hardly justify snuffing out the Statue of Liberty’s welcoming torch.
Anyway, since it’s Friday, we’ll leave you with something fun: The Nib released the first episode of its animated series, which includes a version of that “tu quoque troll” cartoon we mentioned a couple weeks ago.
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