When your entire life is dedicated to building a wall of lies, every week is infrastructure week.
In this regard, there is no American in history, that is a more prolific brick layer than Donald J. Trump. His serial lying spans decades.
The top lies that infuriate me are:
His lies about the Central Park Five.
His Birtherism lie.
His lies about the immigrants that choose to call America home.
And more recently, his lie about who is going to pay for his vanity wall and who is to blame for the current government shutdown.
What unhinges me into incoherence, is that I do not think there is enough proportional push back from the media, from politicians or from anyone in hearing distance of his toxic fabulist tales.
He is the occupant of the most powerful office in the world and he should be held accountable for making up or changing stories. But he isn’t. At least, not to my satisfaction.
Every day I wish people would calmly state, you are a liar and the truth is not in you and here is a downloadable PowerPoint presentation that I am making instantly available to every interested voter explaining why you are a liar.
There’s just a collective national shrug. The President’s a liar. That’s the New Normal. Deal with it.
But I can’t deal with it on my own.
Fortunately there are cooler heads in the nation, who unpack his lies and his looming legal troubles—thank you Good News Round Up—so I can get through this dark timeline without losing it.
Today I came across a calm, coherent and even tongue-in-cheek dismantling, written a few days ago, about how we got from ‘I will build a wall and Mexico will pay for it,’ to ‘Somebody will build a wall—possibly the military—and Democrats, must pay for it.’ (Just typing this sentence ticks me off, no end. I can’t believe we are here.)
My thanks to Matt Yglesias for writing this.
I’m starting to think Mexico isn’t going to pay for the wall
And my doubts are only growing.
By Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesiasmatt@vox.com Dec 20, 2018, 12:00pm EST
He starts at the beginning.
Not at the beginning of the shutdown. But where we should start: at the beginning of the lie.
“I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively,” Trump said. “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall.”
For me, the discussion begins and ends there.
But Matt calmly guides me out of my intransigence and shows me how the Wall discussion started to morph to where we are today.
Mexico pay[ing] for the wall was actually one of the few issues on which the Trump 2016 campaign actually released a detailed policy agenda. It’s still up on his website, in fact, and it explains that coercing Mexico into paying for the wall will be a simple matter of invoking Section 326 of the USA Patriot Act to “issue detailed regulations” under 31 CFR § 130.120-121 to block remittance payments from unauthorized residents of the United States back to friends and family in Mexico.
According to the Trump campaign, “It’s an easy decision for Mexico: make a one-time payment of $5-10 billion to ensure that $24 billion continues to flow into their country year after year.”
I was shocked to discover that this was semi-thought out, with regulations and §’s and everything.
Then Matt enlists Stephen Heifetz and Kaitlin Cassel at the Steptoe International Compliance Blog to explain why this plan was complete and utter B.S. from the get go.
[They] argue in some detail that using this regulatory mechanism would likely impede a lot of legitimate commerce while doing little to reduce remittances. Trump, it turns out, was not really as versed in the policy weeds of this as he portrayed himself to be.
What’s more, Trump’s whole discussion of the issue was really based on an apples-and-oranges comparison. Money transferred by Mexican-born residents of the United States back to residents of Mexico is not a budgetary cost to the US federal government, nor is it a budgetary resource that the Mexican government can tap.
At some point, between the initial lie and prior to the current White House occupant becoming President, the lie started shape shifting.
Mexico would still be paying for the wall, Trump insisted, but first Congress would need to put up front money. Then Mexico would pay us back.
But make no mistake. Mexico was still going to totally pay for this wall and any reporting to the contrary, was fake news, according to Trump.
What an amazing sleight of thumb.
We went from Mexico will pay for it, to Congress will, and nobody seemed to say anything about that erosion from the original adamant declaration that Mexico will 100% pay for this wall. At least, nobody said anything loud enough for my taste.
So that was the new beginning. In one fireside tweet, he moved the conversation from Mexico paying, to Congress and taxpayers suddenly being in the wall building business.
Now watch what how the lie morphs again, a mere 12 days later.
You have got to be kidding me.
Indirectly paying for it?
How did he get away with this?
The same press and pundits who inundated us with profiles about Trump’s no-holds-barred, straight talk that was a lesson for the ages, which politicians in general, and Democrats in particular need to watch and learn, blithely let him get away with Mexico will “indirectly” pay for the wall (eventually) but Congress and U.S. taxpayers will need to put up the money first.
The Trump watchers learned the wrong lesson. Instead of being kowtowed into silence from his bellowing and name calling, they should have been calling him out from day one.
They should have hammered from the beginning that we was a backtracking, flip flopping, prevaricator, just like any other swamp dwelling, poll-tested politician.
Fast-forward a year after all the Trump chumps accepted his reality distortions.
All of a sudden he just assert as fact that Mexico is indirectly paying for and nobody asks for proof.
They are not paying for it indirectly or directly.
Tell him that. Tell Sarah that and keep saying it, every time they lie.
You need to stop him immediately and relentlessly, for the historical record. Otherwise you lead to the madness where we are today.
You should have drilled him about it as a candidate, like you drilled Sarah Palin and exposed her know nothingness and saved us from her vice Presidency. (Although honestly, it feels like she’s President, with the current arrogant ignorance that is this administration.)
Here’s what happens when you don’t nip these lies in the bud. He just builds bigger ones.
Has anybody followed up to confirm who the contractor is?
Assuming that he personally measured it with his necktie, what the hell is 115 mile of wall going to do?
Will he be doling out different contracts, in 115 mile increments, and if so how long will it take for Humpty Trumpty to build his hodepodge wall?
And if has the power to build this Frankenwall, one contract at a time, why does he need Mexico or Congress?
For sanity’s sake and for history’s sake, thank you Matt Yglesias for chronicling the anatomy of a Great Lie.
It will guide me and calm me, I hope, for the many great lies to come.