Why Trump is getting away with lying about Obama
Yesterday, Trump’s slur of Barack Obama, the last sane President of the United States, made headlines.
President Trump falsely asserted on Monday that his predecessor, Barack Obama, and other presidents did not contact the families of American troops killed in duty, drawing a swift, angry rebuke from several of Mr. Obama’s former aides.
Mr. Trump was responding to a question about why he had not spoken publicly about the killing of four Green Berets in an ambush in Niger two weeks ago when he made the assertion. Rather than answering the question, Mr. Trump said he had written personal letters to their families and planned to call them in the coming week. Then he pivoted to his predecessors.
“If you look at President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn’t make calls,” Mr. Trump said during a news conference in the Rose Garden with the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell. “A lot of them didn’t make calls. I like to call when it’s appropriate.”
Mr. Trump’s assertion belied a long record of meetings Mr. Obama held with the families of killed service people, as well as calls and letters, dating to the earliest days of his presidency. Before he decided to deploy 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, Mr. Obama traveled to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to greet the coffins of troops.
Trump’s follow-up just made things worse:
“The traditional way if you look at President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn’t make calls. A lot of them didn’t make calls,” Trump said in the White House Rose Garden.
Obama’s former aides reacted quickly — and in a language even Trump can understand. Buzzfeed reports:
Alyssa Mastromonaco, a former aide to President Obama, called the claim “a fucking lie” on Twitter.
that’s a fucking lie. to say president obama (or past presidents) didn’t call the family members of soldiers KIA – he’s a deranged animal.
— Alyssa Mastromonaco (@AlyssaMastro44) October 16, 2017
A former Joint Chiefs chair also weighed in:
POTUS 43 & 44 and first ladies cared deeply, worked tirelessly for the serving, the fallen, and their families. Not politics. Sacred Trust.
— GEN(R) Marty Dempsey (@Martin_Dempsey) October 17, 2017
And yes — where was that liberal press with their liberal media bias?
Really? You can’t believe the media that has worked so hard to normalize him continued to be complicit in his madness?
— MengdenTheMerciless (@thejd44) October 16, 2017
And Trump’s Obama smear was not the only lie of the press appearance yesterday:
Trump lies again that China’s corporate tax rate is 15%. (It’s 25%, 15% only for advanced industries in certain designated cities.)
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) October 16, 2017
But wait! There’s more!
Trump also responded to a question about his campaign being subpoenaed by lawyers representing a woman who says he sexually assaulted her by saying: “It’s totally fake news. Just fake. It’s made-up stuff.”
It doesn’t look made up to us…
(Click here for the full subpoena.)
See a pattern emerging here? Take your choice:
- Trump is a congenital liar, which should have come as no surprise to voters in the wake of his scandalous career as a so-called “real estate mogul” turned game show host;
- Trump’s petty and possibly racist loathing of Obama has manifest itself in his “agenda,” which is to undo everything Obama did for our nation, and it is therefore no surprise that Trump would lie about Obama’s communications with the families of fallen soldiers.
- Trump is simply detached from reality, either due to some form of senility or long-term mental illness, and the only reason we haven’t already had a small-scale nuclear war in the Pacific is that adult day care is working.
It could be any or all of the above, but the fact remains: the “liberal press” should made Trump’s outright lies the headline (as did MSNBC, to some extent).
The GOP just doesn’t care, because they need a puppet in the Oval Office who will rubber-stamp their agenda of stripping individuals of power and giving it all to large corporate entities — including the ones that won’t report honestly on the crisis of Trump’s mental acuity and erratic behavior.
Both the press and the GOP are normalizing and enabling a man who is so obviously unfit for office that he should be removed under the 25th Amendment.
