Tag: Trump lies

Tell-All Authors Confronted Donald Trump On His Lies And He Replied With 1 Word

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The former president was uncharacteristically honest with his response to Washington Post journalists Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker.

Former President Donald Trump had a surprisingly candid response when challenged over the tens of thousands of lies he told during his time in office, according to the author of a new tell-all book.

“We asked him why, as president, he thought it was OK for him to continually tell the American people things that were not true, to lie again and again and again,” Washington Post journalist Philip Rucker recalled of interviewing Trump on Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“And he said to us, ‘You know, there’s a beautiful word, and it’s called disinformation,’” Rucker said. Continue reading.

Opinion: The absurdity of Putin’s lies should be obvious. Thanks to Trump, it isn’t.

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For the past few years, Republicans in Congress have echoed Russian propaganda. On Wednesday, in Geneva, Vladimir Putin returned the favor: He echoed Republican propaganda.

After a meeting with President Biden, Russia’s strongman used his moment on the international stage to hold a news conference. ABC News’s Rachel Scott was waiting for him.

“The list of your political opponents who are dead, imprisoned or jailed is long,” she said, including “Alexei Navalny, whose organization calls for free and fair elections and an end to corruption …. So my question, Mr. President: What are you so afraid of?” Continue reading.

‘Inside Job?’: Republican strategist explains how GOP’s vote against the Jan. 6 commission really looks

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Conservatives seem happy to lie about everything from election fraud to Sandy Hook, until it’s time to go to court.

One Republican strategist has a relatively different take on the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. While an overwhelming number of Americans have blamed former President Donald Trump for inciting the insurrection, one strategist actually views the entire ordeal as an “inside job.” 

On Friday, May 28, Rick Wilson appeared on The Dean Obeidallah Show where he expressed frustration over House and Senate Republicans’ failure to support the establishment of the Jan. 6 commission. where he expressed frustration over House and Senate Republicans’ failure to support the establishment of the Jan. 6 commission.While the commission would have opened the door for a thorough investigation into the U.S. Capitol insurrection, Republican lawmakers managed to block the effort by way of the filibuster. 

According to the longtime Republican, the lawmakers’ efforts appear to be relative to an “inside job.” When asked how Democratic lawmakers should move forward politically, Wilson laid out his arguments. Continue reading.

The census results just demolished one of the biggest lies that defined Trump’s presidency

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Former President Donald Trump was infamous for his cruelty and hostility to immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees from around the world. He slashed refugee admissions to their lowest levels in decades, and justified it with a simple message: “Our country is full.”

But according to Vox, a new trove of data from the Census Bureau lays this bare as a lie. Not only is America not “full,” its population growth is in catastrophic slowdown — and dependent on immigration to maintain its society and government in its current form.

“Economists broadly agree that population growth fuels economic growth in wealthy countries,” wrote Nicole Narea. “But the recently released census figures show the US population grew by just 7.4 percent, or 331.5 million people, between 2010 and 2020 — the lowest rate since the 1930s. Projections suggest that, unless current trends change, those numbers could continue to diminish dramatically over the next two to three decades, with the population growing by just 78 million by 2060.” Continue reading.

Why Did Our Top Officials Lie About China — And Russia?

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Before Merrick Garland took office last week, the new attorney general surely understood that he would face a difficult and almost-overwhelming set of problems — including reconstruction of the Justice Department after the ruinously partisan rule of his predecessor William Barr; overseeing hundreds of federal prosecutions of Jan. 6 insurrectionists; and dealing with the scandal detritus of the Trump regime, which may eventually involve indictments of the former president, his associates and even members of his family.

But this week, we learned of still more troubling issues that may require Garland’s attention, when the department of homeland security and the director of national intelligence released declassified reports on foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election. The classified versions of those reports were on the attorney general’s desk when he arrived for his first day of work, and what they indicate is the worst U.S. intelligence scandal since the fabricated reports that justified the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Continue reading “Why Did Our Top Officials Lie About China — And Russia?”

Rabidly pro-Trump ‘news’ network OAN goes silent on Facebook and YouTube

OANN has scrubbed its website of links to the network’s accounts on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

One America News Network (OANN), a far-right conservative media outlet, has not posted any videos to its Facebook or YouTube accounts in over a month.

The social media blackout by OANN, which has been closely affiliated with Donald Trump and has for years been a leading source of pro-Trump conspiracy theories and disinformation, has come since President Joe Biden was sworn into office and as he has gone about seating his Cabinet and undoing many of Trump’s policies.

The last time a video was posted to the OANN YouTube account was Jan. 9. The most recent video posted to Facebook by OANN was uploaded on Jan. 8. The network has a large following on both of those platforms, with 1.5 million followers on Facebook and 1.4 million YouTube subscribers. Continue reading.

Texas Republican Will Hurd gives GOP a brutal lesson on civics and political reality

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Texas Republican Will Hurd drew upon his six years in Congress and nine years as a clandestine CIA officer in a hard-hitting new op-ed published by The Washington Post.

Hurd, who did not seek re-election in 2020, warned that the 2022 midterms will be consumed by ads highlighting the connections between the GOP and the deadly insurrection by Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.

“Republicans have lost seven of the last eight national popular votes, and it only took four years for us to lose the House, Senate and the White House. Republicans aren’t going to achieve electoral success by being seen as the party that defends QAnon extremists who advocate the murder of the former vice president. Nor will we see success by supporting white supremacists who call a Black police officer the n-word while that police officer puts his life on the line to protect democracy. Every Republican on the ballot in 2022 will face campaign attack ads that affiliate them with the domestic terrorists who charged the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6,” he warned. Continue reading.

No, Trump Didn’t Bring Back Jobs From China And Mexico

Now that his term finally is over, let’s examine Donald Trump’s performance on a key promise: reclaiming manufacturing jobs, especially from China and Mexico, to raise U.S. wages.

Evaluation first, then a grade. (Can you guess?)

Our trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, last summer praised several companies that dropped plans to move jobs offshore. The “era of reflexive offshoring is over,” he claimed in a New York Times op-ed last May. Continue reading.

The Trump presidency was marked by battles over truth itself. Those aren’t over.

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President Trump stands as a singular figure in American history for his willingness to entertain conspiracy theories from the Oval Office, and none has been more damaging or far reaching than his unsubstantiated claim that the 2020 election was rigged against him. One out of every three Americans believes that there was widespread fraud in the last presidential election, according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, despite no evidence to support that view. Two in three Republicans believe so.

The social conditions that brought so many people to believe the falsehoods Trump has told about the election and a litany of other issues took root decades before he became a political figure and will extend far beyond the four years of his administration, according to scholars of disinformation and conspiratorial thinking.

“What’s unique about Donald Trump is that he took advantage of this widespread distrust of government and media to say everyone is lying to you except for me. We have never had a president so devoted to spreading disinformation and trying to overturn an election,” said Kathryn Olmsted, a historian at the University of California at Davis. “The people who stormed the Capitol are absolutely convinced that the election was stolen. They’re not being opportunistic; they really believe this. And all of the social science shows that if someone really believes a conspiracy theory, it is just about impossible to change their minds.” Continue reading.

How one man went from attending Obama’s inauguration to dying in the mob protesting Trump’s election loss

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In 2009, Kevin Greeson traveled from Alabama to witness the inauguration of President Barack Obama, at the time one of his political heroes. Twelve years later, a stone’s throw from where Obama had been sworn in, Greeson died of a heart attack while demonstrating in support of President Donald Trump during the Jan. 6 siege of the Capitol.

Greeson had undergone a stark political transformation in those intervening years. A longtime Democrat who once championed unions and supported progressive politicians, Greeson had become a staunch Trump supporter by the time he died outside the Capitol at the age of 55.

In the weeks leading up to his death, he gave up Fox News for less mainstream right-wing news sources and wrote a series of posts on the conservative-leaning social media site Parler advocating political violence in response to what he saw as Democrats’ efforts to “steal” the 2020 election from the president. Continue reading.