Trump continues his lying ways
“A slogan must be presented from different angles, but the end of all remarks must always and immutably be the slogan itself. Only in this way can the propaganda have a unified and complete effect.”
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
The slogan?
“Make America Great Again!”
Presidential candidate Trump ended each of his campaign speeches with that phrase.
First, though, he’d sprinkle every speech with the ways in which America is in peril of throwing itself on the ash heap of history.
To Trump, unemployment is raging, though it really isn’t; violent crime is at an all-time high, with no data to prove it; China invented climate change. Not true, either.
Convince enough people that the country in dire need of a complete remodeling, and that you’re the only person equipped with the hammers and nails to do it, and you’ll get rewarded with the presidency.
Job done.
But within hours of his official ascendance to the presidency, he realized he’s not finished remodeling.
That he’s got more hammerin’ to do.
The day after he was sworn in, he decided to do a little fence-mending at CIA headquarters, since he’d accused members of the intelligence community of acting in concert with the “dishonest media,” to “delegitimize” his less-than-humungous election victory.
Standing in front of a hallowed wall that honors fallen CIA members, Trump paid little homage to them, before he launched into a fiction about his favorite subject – Donald J. Trump.
He curiously bragged about the times he graced the cover of Time Magazine.
“I’ve been on it for 15 times this year. (2016).
Wrong.
He’d only appeared on the cover of Time Magazine nine times. His face had been on it four times, because the other five times we only see the back of his head, or an artist’s depiction.
But he saved his juiciest fiction for his interpretation of the side-by-side pictures that show his inauguration ceremony paled in comparison to Barack Obama’s in 2009.
“I looked out, the field was, it looked like a million, a million and a half people,” the mathematically-inclined new president proclaimed.
Perhaps he’d performed a personal head count.
It was obvious that the enormous size of the Women’s March that took place that day, stuck in our new leader’s craw.
He may have flipped on his TV, and realized that those three million people around the world protesting him, aren’t as enamored of him, as he is of himself.
Later that day, Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer, went into beast-mode, chastising the media for, well, telling the truth about the inaugural crowd size.
The following morning, Trump’s advisor Kellyanne Conway continued to hammer away at the fairytale. Her appearance on NBC’s Meet the Nation, will go down in history as the birth of the phrase “alternative facts.”
Get used to that phrase. It’ll probably be around for at least four years!
Facts, alternative, not real, found their way into President Trump’s White House reception for Republican and Democratic congressional leaders on Monday night.
It was there that he pulled out, and brushed off that old claim of his, that there’d been millions of illegal votes cast in the November election.
That’s a convenient claim, since he lost the popular vote by millions of votes.
The following day, Spicer appeared at his daily press briefing armed with a supposed PEW study that proves Trump had been the victim of massive voter fraud.
But the person who helped perform that PEW study, researcher David Becker, responded by saying, “I don’t know of any study that has found any kind of significant voter fraud.”
Predictably, Trump is so consumed with his desires to act like a 10-year-old, that he’s calling for “a major investigation into voter fraud.”
I began this with a quote from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
I’ll end it with one too.
“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”
Edward A. Owens is a three time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net