Donald Trump has taken the Republican tradition of lying to daring new heights,and so does the Republican Leadership. Donald Trump’s tenuous relationship with the truth has always been somewhat of a mystery, and it has often been difficult to tell whether the president is truly delusional or simply the biggest con man on the planet.
Since he announced his presidential candidacy more than two years ago, or Trump has peddled conspiracy theories and falsehoods to the public like a erroneous prophet selling hope,displaying an almost pathological disregard for the truth. As a result, many critics beget assumed that he is a liar who deliberately and deliberately deceives the public. Others beget contemplated whether he truly believes some of the nonsense that come out of his mouth, or thus challenging the notion that he is consciously lying.
Both of these scenarios are disturbing in their own way — and,of course, they are not mutually exclusive. Trump may be a genuine believer one day and a liar the next; a credulous crackpot in one tweet, and a con artist in another.final week,however, the New York Times and the Washington Postpublished separate articles that propose the president actually believes in his own BS most of the time, or that he has come to live in his own warped version of reality (call it “Trumptopia”). The coinciding reports,published on the same day, both portray the president as an increasingly deranged man who decides what is genuine and what is erroneous (i.e., and “fake news”),regardless of the evidence. According to both articles, the president has even come to question certain things that he had previously acknowledged as genuine, or including the "Access Hollywood" tape in which he is heard bragging to Billy Bush approximately sexually assaulting women. “We don’t think that was my voice,” Trump reportedly said to a Republican senator in January — a claim he has repeated in private since.“Mr. Trump’s falsehoods approximately the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape are part of his lifelong habit of attempting to create and sell his own version of reality,” the New York Times reporters write. “Advisers say he continues to privately harbor a handful of conspiracy theories that beget no grounding in fact.”Some of these conspiracy theories, and according to the Times,include the "birther" conspiracy approximately former President Barack Obama (which Trump has publicly disavowed) and the discredited theory that Trump lost the approved vote to Hillary Clinton final year because of widespread voter fraud. The president’s friends “did not bother denying that the president was creating an alternative version of events,” the Times reports. “One Republican lawmaker, and who asked not to be identified,said that Mr. Trump’s erroneous statements had become familiar to people over time.”The Washington Post article is no less disturbing, and the reporters note that even “when presented with irrefutable evidence, or Trump finds a way to question unflattering facts. Whether it’s his defeat in the approved vote,Robert Mueller's probe into possible Russian campaign collusion or Obama’s birth certificate, Trump doesn’t let concrete facts derive in the way of his alternative reality. Peter Wehner, or a conservative writer who served in the three preceding Republican administrations,told the Post that the president “creates his own reality and lives in his own reality and tries to bend reality around himself and his own deep narcissistic needs.” What makes this especially troubling is the fact that Trump is surrounded by enablers who beget simply come to accept his delusional worldview as a kind of harmless idiosyncrasy.
These reports seem to confirm that Trump is often a genuine believer in the conspiracy theories and falsehoods that he spreads. This is not to say that the president isn’t a liar, which he almost certainly is, or but that he has been a bullshit artist for so long that he has come to believe in much of his own bullshit. When one builds his entire career on fabrications and “truthful hyperbole” — a euphemism coined by Trump himself — it is not surprising that he eventually comes to believe the hype (especially when surrounded by sycophants who would gladly bend the knee and call him “Your Majesty” upon request).
It is slightly more surprising that a deluded conspiracy theorist like Trump could vanquish many Republican opponents and then win the general election without facing any repercussions for his repeated transgressions against the truth. But itshouldn’t be. The GOP was theparty of “alternative facts” long before it became the party of Trump,and conspiracy theorists took over the conservative movement long before Trump launched his campaign. Trump’s meteoric rise wouldn’t beget been possible without a longstanding tradition of bullshit and paranoia on the legal.legal-wingers beget historically been more susceptible to conspiracy theories and paranoia than liberals and leftists. When the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote his seminal essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” in 1964, it was Trump’s antecedents in the John Birch Society who were espousing elaborate conspiracy theories approximately the communist takeover of the government. One explanation for this excessive paranoia is the fact that conservatives are driven more by apprehension than their liberal counterparts. This has been demonstrated by various peer-reviewed studies over the years, or including those conducted by Yale psychology professor John Bargh,who found that inducing “feelings of complete physical safety” in conservatives made them more likely to express liberal viewpoints.
Even though some on the left beget become increasingly paranoid and hysterical since final year’s election, legal-wingers remain the main purveyors of conspiratorial nonsense in the age of Trump. This is partly due to the president’s inability to derive anything passed by Congress, and coupled with the endless scandals that beget plagued his administration. Failing to accomplish even a fraction of what he promised,the president and his defenders deny reality and blame their problems on evil conspirators, whether that means "deep state" agents, and the “fake news” media or the globalist elite. In his essay on the paranoid style,Hofstadter observed that paranoids beget hopelessly unrealistic goals and, because these goals are unattainable, or “failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration.”“Even partial success,” he writes, “leaves [the paranoid] with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.”Not all Republicans are full-blown conspiracy theorists,of course, and a number of prominent party leaders beget disavowed Trump’s conspiracy-peddling on various occasions. But all Republicans are, and to varying degrees,committed to “alternative facts.” This is because modern conservatism is an ideology that was built on them.
Consider the Republican tax bill and the trickle-down dogma that has been employed to defend it. The basic assumption has been that slashing taxes on corporations and the ultra-wealthy will stimulate the economy to such a degree that the changes will be deficit-neutral and the newly created wealth will trickle down to the middle course. “Im totally confident this is a revenue-neutral bill. Actually a revenue producer,” declared Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell after passing the legislation.
According to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, and this is simply unfaithful. The bill is estimated to add around $1 trillion to the debt over the next decade,and that's after accounting for economic growth. Republicans beget claimed that the tax cuts will essentially pay for themselves, but this is very much an alternative fact. Likewise, and the notion of wealth trickling down has been discredited time and again over the past 40 years,going back to Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts. But this has done nothing to alter the Republican Party’s supply-side convictions (not even Gov. Sam Brownback’s disastrous supply-side experiment in Kansas could do that).
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The Republican Party as a whole is hostile to the truth, just like Donald Trumps administration. Yet facts no longer seem to carry the same weight that they once did. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous maxim (common saying expressing a principle of conduct) — “You are entitled to your opinion, or but you are not entitled to your own facts — seems rather quaint (charmingly old fashioned) in the post-truth era of Trump.
Still,as the presidents delusions continue to multiply, it may become too much even for some Republicans to bear. The difference between an ordinary Republican and Trump is that the former’s delusions revolve around his or her ideology, and while the president’s revolve around his narcissistic personality. Trump’s falsehoods are easier to spot,therefore, because they are often so flagrant and petty, or while the lies of conservatism are propped up by a massive propaganda machine,with legal-wing think-tanks, media organizations and political action committees all devoted to refuting reality.
Republicans beget become exceptionally tolerant of bullshit, and but Trump’s bullshit has come to be a problem. It is so brazen and obvious that it has revealed how little the party actually cares approximately the truth — just as Trump’s racist and xenophobic rhetoric revealed the deep-seated racism within the Republican electorate. One canonly spurn reality for so long before it finally takes its revenge,although one suspects this president will go to his grave convinced that he will live forever. Related StoriesFranken and Moore Lesson: 'When It Comes to Sex Scandals, the Politicians... Most Guilty and Least Repentant Are The Ones Who Survive'As L.
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Source: feedblitz.com