Never give a microphone to a compulsive liar.
One estimate says that Trump has publicly lied at least 180,000 times in the last decade. And we were to expect truth -- any truth -- on Thursday night???????
Well, not everybody carried it. NBC, CNN and ABC refused to preempt their regularly scheduled program to host this rant. Fox, of course, gleefully carried Dear Leader’s diatribe. CBS, interestingly, sandwiched Trump’s frazzled, disjointed toddler tantrum over … let’s see … Joe Biden and Barack Obama (the usual suspects), rehashed election lies, and a plug to have your vote stolen by the Save Act … with actual fact-checking. I applauded these decisions. But was I right?
James Carville says I was not:
Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville on Friday criticized major television networks for not airing President Trump’s speech on election security the previous night, saying that it was a mistake for CNN, NBC and ABC not to provide “blanket coverage” of what he sees as the president’s deteriorating mental state.
“I think the president of the United States acting loonier than a tune is newsworthy,” Carville told CNN host Wolf Blitzer during an appearance on the network. “I don’t think we should have hidden that from the American people.”
So, what did he say? Markwayne Mullen, DHS secretary, summed up this morning the lies he had helped Trump concoct.
The claim that “250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in California, in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada” was conjured by Mullin. David Becker, the executive director of the non-partisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, said the administration has not been “transparent about the methodology” in reaching that number.
Mullin also repeated many of the president’s baseless conspiracy theories that he pushed on Thursday evening – particularly that voting machines are unsafe and insecure. This, despite election officials and cybersecurity experts routinely underscoring that these machines are not connected to the internet and undergo scrupulous testing before each election to make sure they haven’t been compromised.
Mullin also repeated his threat of withholding Federal Emergency Management Agency grant funding to states that don’t work to “secure” elections. Or, you help the president steal the midterms or you don’t get FEMA help when all hell breaks loose. Note: The federal government has previously sought access to state voter rolls, which contain the personal data of millions of Americans. States have refused to turn the data over, resulting in a number of lawsuits that the administration has lost.
So then, in the category of Even a Broke Clock Is Right Twice a Day, Trump claims people are trying to steal the election. Partially true:
TRUMP is trying to steal the midterms by rigging the election apparatus, by gaining control of election mechanisms that are solely the province of the states, by throwing ICE in people’s faces so they’re afraid, by finding mechanisms to disqualify thousands of voters in battleground states likely to go blue—specifically those “in California, in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada” where Billy Bob — oops, no … Markwayne — says that 250,000 non-citizens have made their way onto the rolls.
Oh, the Chinese!!! And the Deep State!
States losing their legitimacy, political scientists tell us, need two enemies — one external and one internal. In this case, the external enemy was, Trump claimed, the Chinese; the internal one, the deep state that withheld that information from him and from the American people. Trump called for investigations into those who he accuses of withholding information on alleged Chinese interference into the 2020 election.
Trump was, in fact, just lying again. As ABC sums it up:
Officials from both the Biden and Trump administrations said there was no intelligence indicating that voting machines or vote totals were changed. In March 2021, two months into the Biden administration, a declassified Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) publicly acknowledged the belief among some intelligence officials that “China took at least some steps to undermine former President Trump’s reelection chances.” But the ICA said any such actions were “primarily through social media and official public statements and media,” not through interference with “election processes.”
Trump is a Punisher — always.
Not pleased that ABC and CBS refused to carry his bullshit speech, Trump THREATENED PUNISHMENT, as usual. USAToday summed it up this way:
Toward the end of his nearly 26-minute long address from the White House, Trump criticized the networks for not broadcasting it live, alleging that the decision was made “because of the fact that they don’t like the topic.”
“Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses,” he said. “They use our public, multi-billion dollar in value, airways for absolutely no money. They pay nothing. All we want is honesty in our elections and honesty in reporting.”
Just to keep this madness just a tiny bit sane: It’s not fraud, El Taco: it’s a programming choice.
And I still think it was a public service to cut this man’s mic.