My loathing of Donald J. Trump is no secret. He is an inveterate, pathological liar and a dangerous, egomaniacal, potty-mouthed, confessed sexual predator, and narcissistic bully who has not released his tax returns, and who will take America to hell on a rocket ship.
Last year, a prominent Republican donor refused to contribute to Trump’s campaign calling him an “ignorant, dishonest, misogynistic, philandering, isolationist, blowhard.”
Trump has surrounded himself with Cabinet and White House appointees, who deserve even less esteem than His Nibs.
Fittingly, the first official words out of the mouth of The Donald’s “spokesman” Sean Spicer were a lie, confirming a “doozy” of a lie by the president that his inaugural crowd was larger than the crowd celebrating the swearing in of President Barack Obama in 2009. Liars! If the photographic evidence wasn’t convincing enough, the record of riders on the Metro system and the number of buses from out of town this year were all a fraction of the numbers in ’09.
Then here comes senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway. If I participated in name-calling she’d be “Clownway,” not “Conway” in my book.
Conway gets on sympathetic Fox News and says that Spicer had spoken “alternative facts,” which she implied were equal in veracity with true facts. Alternative facts, pure and simple, are lies! So now, along with the president, two of his top advisers are not only shown to be open-faced liars for the whole world to see, they, like their boss, are laughingstocks, and worse.
Moments after Conway blurted out “alternative facts” to defend a Trump-Spicer lie, comparisons of these new “Trump Doctrines” to the villains in George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” started trending on social media. In Orwell’s world, the mind-controlling government engaged in “newspeak” and “doublethink” where Big Brother’s alternative facts were superior to the real facts, just like in Trump’s World.
That similarity was not lost on the masses of this country’s readers. On Amazon that week, sales of Orwell’s “1984” skyrocketed 9,600 percent!
As you might expect, not all of the lies engulfing this administration — which ain’t even a month old, for crying out loud — are funny. National Security Adviser-designate, and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn straight-out lied to Vice President Mike Pence’s face about a phone call Flynn had with the Russian ambassador, before Trump was inaugurated. A no-no.
The Veep repeated the lie on TV, when asked whether Flynn improperly told the Russians that new sanctions and the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats would be rescinded when Trump took office. No joke.
It’s illegal for private citizens to negotiate U.S. foreign policy with other governments. Flynn now says the subject may have come up in his conversation after all. Pence —otherwise the adult in the Trump inner circle — has been caught, repeating the lie.
The harm is like the harm inflicted on the 1980 presidential election when a deal was cooked up by operatives working for GOP presidential candidate Ronald Reagan. His people convinced the Iranians not to release the 400 U.S. hostages being held at the U.S. embassy until after Reagan defeated incumbent President Jimmy Carter at the polls. In this case, the Russians modulated their diplomatic response. Rather than expelling 35 American diplomats tit-for-tat, the Kremlin extended its hospitality to the U.S. diplomats who remained in Moscow, just as if they had been coached by an insider to not retaliate.
So far, Pence has been Mr. Dudley-Do-Right, explainer-in-chief of this administration. So, for Pence to now look like Trump and Spicer and Conway? Some repairs will have to be made to Pence’s reputation, while he still has a rep to protect.
Leave it to Kellyanne Conway give us a parting chuckle. It was cheesy enough that first lady Melania Trump wore a piece of jewelry from her own fashion line during the first couple’s interview with “60 Minutes” on CBS News. Cheesy, indeed.
Then we have daughter Ivanka Trump’s clothing line which has been falling in popularity in stores, not because of boycotts, but because of unpopularity. One store decided to mix in the line with general merchandise.
Another — Nordstrom — dropped the line altogether. Donald Trump, now President of the United States gets a beef with Nordstrom. He treats their bottom-line, retail decision like an armed aggression against the United States of America. War!
Trump takes to Twitter, and Conway — who lied about repeatedly speaking of a “Bowling Green massacre,” which never even happened — next shamelessly plugged the besieged boss’s daughter’s clothing line, doing what she admitted was a “commercial” for the line during a live TV news interview.
The laughs keep coming, and this administration is not even one month old.