It’s Still News When the President Wages a 40-Minute Assault on Reality

The avalanche of dishonesty from Donald Trump at a briefing Monday evening came to a crescendo with his talk of pre-existing conditions

It’s still worth remarking on when the President of the United States appears in public to unleash an avalanche of lies, particularly during a pandemic and an encroaching economic cataclysm. We should mention up front that it’s a good thing that the incident that caused the Secret Service to temporarily remove the president from the briefing Monday evening did not turn out to be a major threat. We also won’t count Trump’s claim that the person shot by law enforcement outside the White House grounds was “armed” as one of his false ones—things were happening fast, and besides, there was enough to go around here without it.

The president lied about mail-in ballots in Virginia, about Russian interference in the coming election, about foreign countries messing with mail-in ballots, about mail-in voting in New York, about whether the novel coronavirus spread in China, about tariffs, about how testing creates cases (again), about the stockpile of ventilators he inherited, about how the Obama administration “spied” on him. The chance to spout the last one was served up by a good friend from OAN, the network for people who think Fox News is insufficiently loyal to the president (a group which sometimes includes the president), who began her query—which she called an “opinion” question—by essentially asking the president whether it was difficult to be so victimized by very nasty people. This kind of Dear Leader vaudeville has become commonplace in the American republic.