The special counsel assigned by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents finally produced his report that concluded “no charges are warranted” in the case. But Robert Hur, a Republican appointee in Donald Trump’s Department of Justice, took the opportunity to criticize Biden’s mental acuity, portraying the president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
The slur went beyond Hur’s commission, particularly since Hur is not qualified to diagnose neurological conditions, but it blew up in the media to amplify questions about the president’s fitness for office at age 81.
We are expected to ignore that Biden’s all-but-certain opponent in November is a sociopath and compulsive liar who not only has trouble remembering which countries foreign leaders rule — Donald Trump also has said Nikki Haley was in charge of security at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, confusing his Republican rival with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and he said Jeb Bush launched the war in Iraq after 9/11, among his recent “senior moments.”
Of course, Trump also faces 91 felony charges in state and federal jurisdictions and he has been found liable for rape and defamation of his sexual assault victim, as well as fraud in his financial dealings. And his evangelical Christian supporters believe he was sent by God, who apparently overlooked Trump’s cheating on all three of his wives, as well as hundreds of contractors he refused to pay for work during his business career, so we guess it shouldn’t bother us.
The Former Guy is desperate to get back in the White House to stay out of prison. And if he gets back into the White House, the wannabe dictator has threatened to ignore the United States’ NATO responsibilities and let his friend, Russian President Vladimir Putin, take Ukraine and possibly Poland by force, as well as other Eastern European nations, as Putin tries to put the Soviet bloc back together.
Trump’s political operation has embraced Russian-style disinformation, which uses media to produce enough distrust to ensure the public can never mobilize around a coherent narrative. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Trump’s political strategist, Steve Bannon, said in 2018 when he outlined plans to dismantle the “deep state.” “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.”
The zone has been flooded ever since.
PolitiFact in January reached a milestone of 1,000 facts checked on statements made by Trump, when he claimed after his New Hampshire primary win that Democrats used the COVID-19 pandemic to “cheat” in the 2020 presidential election. The claim was rated “Pants on Fire.”
PolitiFact started examining Trump’s statements in 2011, when he was amplifying “birther” conspiracy theories to undermine then-President Barack Obama’s eligibility. Since then, about 76% of Trump’s statements examined by PolitiFact have earned ratings of Mostly False, False or Pants on Fire, which puts him in a class by himself. “It’s not unusual for politicians of both parties to mislead, exaggerate or make stuff up. But American fact-checkers have never encountered a politician who shares Trump’s disregard for factual accuracy,” PolitiFact reported Feb. 1.
Trump’s median rating of False is worse than a cross-section of frequently checked Democratic and Republican politicians. Politicians with median ratings of Half True include Obama, Biden and Hillary Clinton; three senators who ran for president, Mitt Romney, R-Utah, Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; and two longtime congressional leaders, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
“It’s been an astounding eight years in American politics,” said Jennifer Mercieca, a Texas A&M University communication professor and a historian of American political rhetoric. “He’s built his entire political identity on the fact that he doesn’t owe anyone the truth about anything.”
PolitiFact, for all its work, can’t match the Washington Post for comprehensive review of Trump’s contempt for the truth. The Post’s Fact Checker team recorded 30,573 “untruths” told by Trump during his presidency. The team, led by Glenn Kessler, noted on Jan. 24, 2021, “What is especially striking is how the tsunami of untruths kept rising the longer he served as president and became increasingly unmoored from the truth.”
Kessler noted that the Fact Checker staff has been unable to continue that comprehensive pace, but they did review all the public statements during Biden’s first 100 days, and counted 78 false or misleading statements. That compares to 511 such statements in Trump’s first 100 days. Fact Checker noted that, unlike Trump, Biden generally does not repeat claims that have been fact-checked as false.
Onr of Trump’s biggest lies was that the economy was never stronger than during his presidency. The facts: by just about any important measure, the economy under Trump was not doing as well as it did under Presidents Eisenhower, Johnson or Clinton — and, as Trump rode the economic recovery that started under Barack Obama, Trump also rode the COVID pandemic into the economic dumps. Unemployment shot up to 14.7% in April 2020. By the time Trump was turned out of the White House in January 2021, Trump left a 6.7% jobless rate, after a net loss of 2.67 million jobs.
Since then, Biden got the COVID pandemic under control, resolved supply-chain problems left over from Trump’s adminstration, passed an economic package that helped to create more than 14 million jobs, and unemployment dropped below 4% for the past two years. However, Republicans continue to undermine public confidence in Biden’s ability to manage the economy.
People who have spent time with Biden know the president is in full possession of his faculties — completely lucid, with an excellent grasp of detail, Paul Krugman noted in the New York Times. “Of course, most voters don’t get to see him up close, and it’s on Biden’s team to address that. And yes, he speaks quietly and a bit slowly, although this is in part because of his lifetime struggle with stuttering. He also, by the way, has a sense of humor, which I think is important.”
“Most important is that Biden has been a remarkably effective president. Trump spent four years claiming that a major infrastructure initiative was just around the corner, to the point that ‘It’s infrastructure week!’ became a running joke; Biden actually got legislation passed. ... Biden’s technology and climate policies — the latter passed against heavy odds — have produced a surge in manufacturing investment. His enhancement of Obamacare has brought health insurance coverage to millions.
“If you ask me, these achievements say a lot more about Biden’s capacity than his occasional verbal slips,” Krugman wrote. We agree. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2024
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