Lie. Lie. Lie.

The nasty guy gave a speech about the partial government shutdown and his border wall. He thought it was so important he used the Oval Office as a prop. I didn’t watch (nor watched the rebuttal). Saved my sanity.

The most succinct summary of the speech is offered by Melissa McEwan in a short Twitter thread. The first tweet:

Lie. Lie. Lie. Fear-mongering. Lie. Lie. Alarmism. Lie. Racism. Lie. Lie. Lie.

In the rest of the tweets, between calling out more lies she also mentions Nativism, Projection, Scapegoating, Pandering to bigots, Fear-mongering, and Deflection.

In another tweet she wrote:

Reminder: All of Trump's rationales for the wall, and thus the shutdown, are complete lies. That should be the starting point for all punditry. The reasons cited for this pain are bullshit.

Martina Navratilova tweeted:

I can tell you all this for sure- whatever ridiculous propaganda we were fed in then Czechoslovakia, which was mandated by Soviet Union- pales next to the lies being told and repeated by trump and his ilk. I am not kidding… trump truly trumps the communists. And that’s not easy

Anya Malkiel responded:

I agree. And I am from the USSR. Those lies were more coherent and they had a benefit of the iron curtain, so they couldn't be contrasted by facts.

And Navratilova replied:

Exactly. And here we have the benefit of fact checking yet still a higher percentage of people believe the liar in chief than those that ever believed the communist BS…

About that punditry… The Associated Press Politics tweeted:

AP FACT CHECK: Democrats put the blame for the shutdown on Trump. But it takes two to tango. Trump's demand for $5.7 billion for his border wall is one reason for the budget impasse. The Democrats refusal to approve the money is another.

Which prompted historian Kevin Kruse to reply:

AP FACT CHECK: Bank officials put blame for the hostage crisis on the bank robbers. The robbers’ demand for “all the money you have” is one reason for the crisis. But the bank officials’ refusal to pay up is another.

Sarah Kendzior, who studies how authoritarian regimes come to power, explains the quality of that punditry. In one thread, she starts with:

During the presidential campaign:
* WSJ killed op-ed on Trump's mafia ties
* Multiple outlets, most notably NYT, lied about Trump's Kremlin ties and FBI investigation after being briefed on them
* Multiple outlets killed Trump porn star and hush money stories
Those are just the stories on Trump we *know* were killed. There are likely more.

The obvious question: Why?

I've said this before, but it bears repeating: media acquiesence to Trump is not about ratings. Spy, mafia, and sex crime stories sell -- and they killed Trump stories on those topics for years. Standing up to Trump also sells, and most won't do it. The motive is something else.

So these media outlets, who are desperate for income, aren’t doing stories that would bring income. Twitter user Carl Krash asks:

So which is it? Bribery, money laundering, sex trafficking for the 1%, treason? Or all of the above?

Kendzior replied:

I lean toward "all of the above" and is varying as to each outlet and individual.

Now that we know not to trust the mainstream media, we can look at alternative voices to describe the speech.

TV personality Jimmy Kimmel suggested the networks should have at least run a disclaimer:

The following presidential address is a work of fiction.
All personalities, incidents, events, locations and facts were pulled directly from the president's ass.
Any resemblance to reality is entirely coincidental.

In an article for the Globe and Mail, Kendzior wrote about the consequences of the shutdown – workers without pay, inadequate security, damage to national parks. Others have added things like restaurants who have lost customers and our food not being inspected. Kendzior adds:

The unsaid words of every Donald Trump demand are the most important, for they never change: “Or else.”

We are beginning to see what the “or else” is. Kendzior concludes:

There is no life more valuable than another, no victim unworthy of grief – but Mr. Trump’s zero-sum, xenophobic rhetoric tries to convince you there is. This calculated cruelty is also used as a rhetorical bludgeon against his actual enemy, the Democrats, whose attempts at accountability impede Mr. Trump’s apparent attempts at autocratic consolidation.

Their dispute is not about national security: the only security Mr. Trump is concerned with is his own. With the government shut down, he can capitalize on chaos and operate with greater impunity. His speech was not a public address: it was a shakedown proclamation built on venom and vengeance. It will not be his last.

On Twitter Kendzior wrote as part of a link to an episode of her podcast Gaslit Nation:

Do not be fooled: Trump and the GOP know *exactly* what they're doing with this shutdown.

The episode summary elaborates:

We debunk the myth that Trump did not understand what the shutdown would entail and argue that this is exactly what he and his camp have wanted: controlled chaos that allows him and other operatives to more easily strip the country down and sell it for parts. With Trump raising the prospect of a “national emergency," we stand on the precipice of something we’ve dreaded for a long time, and that in other settings has been how dictators consolidate power – by fabricating a massive crisis and exploiting it with a show of force.

I haven’t listened to Gaslit Nation yet. I’ve been reading about so much of this stuff I didn’t also want to spend an hour listening to it as well. Even so, it is highly recommended by those resisting the nasty guy as an explanation of what is going on.

For those who don’t know the term, gaslighting is

a form of psychological manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, making them question their own memory, perception, and sanity. Using persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying, it attempts to destabilize the victim and delegitimize the victim's belief.

The term comes from the 1938 play Gaslight and 1940 and 1944 movies of the same name in which a husband attempts to convince his wife she is insane by changing her environment and claiming nothing has changed and that she remembered thing incorrectly. It’s definitely a form of abuse. Does the term describe anyone you know?

Leah McElrath tweeted:

Looks like we’re headed to an escalation of the ongoing Constitutional crisis as Trump paves the way to declare a national “emergency” because he hasn’t been guaranteed money for his pet construction project.
…
It’s important to understand: Malignant narcissists THRIVE on conflict. Especially when they don’t have access to an endless supply of adoration. They will often sabotage a situation as soon as a given conflict approaches resolution. Think Lucy with the football.

Trump knows he’s holding Americans hostages. He doesn’t care.

They thrive on conflict because conflict brings attention, usually lots of it.

NcEwan, in her Shakesville blog, notes that after the speech a poll of voters found 47% blame the nasty guy for the shutdown and 33% blame Democrats. She adds:

Trump has border-walled himself into a corner, and he now faces a major problem: Even among people who agree with his premise that there's a "crisis" at the southern border, there isn't overwhelming support for building a border wall to solve the problem. And yet he's staked everything on this bullshit border wall idea.

If he backs down now, it will be a major defeat — and Trump cannot tolerate being one of the "losers" he so frequently derides from his rally podiums and Twitter account. He also can't abide being seen as weak by his deplorable cultists.

But he can't win. The longer this goes on, the more power shifts to the Democrats, who aren't backing down and refuse to give him the money to fund the wall.

Which leaves his only choice declaring a national emergency, which is such an immense abuse of power that even some members of his own party balk at the very notion.

As an example of this no way out… Democratic leaders Chuck Shumer and Nancy Pelosi went to visit the nasty guy on next steps. The nasty guy said, “Will you agree to my wall?” Pelosi said no. He said, “Then we have nothing to discuss,” and walked out.

So the nasty guy is talking about invoking a national emergency to get his wall built. And many of us are wondering … the GOP has long expressed their wish to shrink the government. Perhaps they leave it in a state of shutdown?

In the meantime the nasty guy has the military installing concertina wire along the border. That stuff is also known as barbed wire or razor wire. It has sharp points or cutting edges sticking out of it. A lot of people are going to think that’s no big deal, or laugh because the “wall” turned out to be a fence.

But McEwan reminds us razor wire is not benign. She quotes an article that appeared in The Guardian about such wire along the border between Morocco and Melilla. The article quotes Juan López de Uralde:

It's just criminal, because it won't stop people trying to cross the fence. The only thing it will achieves is to cause horrific injuries. On a recent visit to the temporary migrant centre in Melilla I spoke to people who said that when these blades were used before they had to treat people with serious injuries. It is inhumane to do this.

Which, McEwan says, is why the nasty guy is using it.

This isn't neutral. It's designed to do harm to people who are seeking safety.

I’ve seen people begin to wonder, is this big dispute our equivalent to the Reichstag Fire? From the Wikipedia prologue on the term:

The Nazi Party used the fire as evidence that communists were plotting against the German government, and the event is considered pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany.

And from the end of the article:

The term "Reichstag fire" is used by some writers to denote a calamitous event staged by a political movement, orchestrated in a manner that casts blame on their opponents, thus causing the opponents to be viewed with suspicion by the general public.