TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN RALLIES:  JUST A “PACK OF LIES”

 

                                       …Trump lying at his Michigan Rally

 

As Trump is down in the polls, he’s try to lie his way to a win

 

If you’ve seen any clips of what Trump is saying at his re-election campaign rallies, you can see that he is lying his ass off even more than usual.  He even goes after the press, or anyone that debunks all his lies.

At his recent rally in Minnesota, President Trump raged at the media for honestly debunking his lies about Joe Biden.  He then whipped his supporters into a frenzy by boasting about how many desperate refugees he has kept out of our country.  Rage and hate, of course, have long been mainstays of Trump’s rallies.

But what mattered most in his long list of lies was when he recently uncorked those about the Ukraine scandal that was the basis of his impeachment.  It is too bad the Senate Republicans couldn’t have the guts to do their sworn duty.  At the rally, Trump began to tell five big lies about it, and he did it all in under three minutes.  And they added up to a much larger lie, that itself, needs serious attention.

First, the big lies themselves, they came in a 3 minute rant.  First, he went after the California Representative, Adam Schiff.

He said that Schiff’s depiction of Trump’s call was a “fraud.”  Trump was referring to the White House’s rough transcript of his July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and Rep. Adam Schiff’s description of it before Congress, as follows: “We released the transcript of the call, which was so good that that crooked Adam Schiff ... had to make up a fake conversation that never happened … it was a total fraud.

Rep. Schiff, the California Democrat who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, did depict Trump’s call with an impersonation of a mob-style shakedown.  But he explicitly said this was the “essence” of Trump’s call.  Schiff then depicted what happened on the call accurately, by mimicking Trump’s pressing Zelensky to produce dirt on Joe Biden, and Trump’s directing Zelensky to talk to Attorney General William Barr and personal lawyer Rudolph Giuliani to carry it all out.

You see, those things did happen. The idea that the transcript was so exonerating that it forced Schiff to make up a “fraud” version of the call is a very big lie.  In fact, Schiff depicted what is actually in the transcript. Trump is lying to obscure what did happen on the call.

Trump’s “word for word” claim gets at a major issues. Officials believe the White House call transcript likely contains serious, material omissions, including at the most incriminating parts where Trump pressed Zelensky to carry out his questionable political scheme.

Crucially, Democrats have subpoenaed the full call transcript, but the White House has adopted a blanket defiance of any and all such subpoenas, and they may never produce the full “word for word” transcript.  In that critical context, Trump’s suggestion that he’s been fully forthcoming about this transcript is just another big lie.

Trump then said this about Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democrats: “They never thought in a million years that I was going to release a transcript … Nancy Pelosi said, the day before seeing the transcript … said, “We’ve gotta impeach him!” … Then she saw the call, and she said to her people, “What the hell! Nobody ever told me this was the call!”

Trump’s claim is that the transcript was totally exonerating, this is just another big lie.

The call actually depicts Trump pressuring a foreign leader to help him rig the next US election on his behalf.  He was also manufacturing information to undercut our own intelligence services’ conclusion about Russian electoral involvement in 2016 and to smear his potential 2020 opponent.

Counter to Trump’s ridiculous claim that the transcript undercuts the case for impeachment, many Democrats have said, correctly, that it bolstered the case for impeachment.

“The whistleblower’s story was false,” Trump lied, and that “Pelosi pressed forward with the impeachment inquiry upon hearing a false story from a whistleblower that had no clue what was going on.”

The whistleblower’s account has been confirmed as true in many of its particular, and the whistleblower’s account of the call perfectly anticipated what was in the rough transcript released by the White House itself.

Absurdly, Trump was saying both that the whistleblower’s story was false and that the conduct it depicted is totally fine.  All Lies.  He’s obviously hoping voters take his word for it that the call was kosher without bothering to learn its details.

As expected, Trump said, “The call was totally appropriate.” 

He added another lie: “The do-nothing Democrats believe … it should be a crime to have a totally appropriate, casual, beautiful, accurate phone call with a foreign leader. I don’t think so.”

The Post now reports that at least four national security officials were so alarmed by Trump’s ongoing pressure campaign on Ukraine that they lodged objections with a White House lawyer before and right after the call.

What’s more, White House officials loaded the transcript onto a highly classified computer system only “hours” after the call took place. Even if Trump really believes the call was “appropriate,” many of his own officials know it is anything but.  Indeed, anxiety about the call and surrounding events was, “profound, even among Trump’s top advisers.”

So what does this all add up to?

The bigger deception here is as follows:  Trump claims the call was perfectly appropriate. It’s worth noting that in so doing, Trump is explicitly declaring the authority to pressure a foreign leader into helping him rig a US election on his behalf.

But Trump is now claiming the call was appropriate only because it came to light, leaving him no choice. Thus, he is simultaneously resorting to all manner of absurd lies to discredit the people and the process that revealed it, after his own officials went to extraordinary lengths to cover it up. 

All that itself, blows up his claim that the call was totally aboveboard.

What’s more, this discrediting is also necessary because the process is likely to reveal even more incriminating facts about the long-running campaign surrounding the call, such as a possible quid pro quo involving hundreds of millions of dollars in frozen military aid to Ukraine.

Trump’s first move was to aggressively covered it up. Now both he’s saying both the call and its coverup are being falsified.  And going forward, extraordinary measures are being exercised to prevent any further facts from coming out.

We have to get rid of this stain on our nation.

Copyright G. Ater 2020