Blowhard

Trump has blustered that he may not promise a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the November election.

But will Trump follow through on his disturbing threats? Flipping through the news clips of his presidency, one can’t help but notice his penchant for issuing of ground-scorching threats that end in flounder and retreat. He not only loves to bluff, but he loves to bluff big.

- he made nuclear war noises against North Korea and then cuddled with Kim Jong-un in a pair of summits
- vowed to jail Hillary Clinton but folded
- laid the rhetorical groundwork for invading Venezuela but then backed down
- threatened to close the border with Mexico
- demanded that General Motors reopen its Lordstown plant
- promised to end birthright citizenship
- said he would strip California of federal funds
- pledged to adjourn Congress
- bragged of holding “absolute“ power over the states that he would use to reopen them
- he even thought he could bluff the pandemic into submission by claiming that it would disappear soon

 

Recognized Overseas, Too

Urban Dictionary:

A completely useless person that spouts constant bullshit. Popularized by the people of Scotland after Donald Trump congratulated them on voting for independence. (Scotland actually voted to stay in the European Union.)

Dying Wish

President Trump routinely passes along false and misleading information that has been circulating online. Today, he appeared to be the one starting it.

Shortly before Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, she made a request about what should happen to her seat on the Supreme Court. “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed,” Ms. Ginsburg said, according to NPR, which reported that the 87-year-old justice dictated the note to her granddaughter, Clara Spera, in the final days of her life.

But during a “Fox & Friends” interview on Monday morning, President Trump claimed, without evidence, that Justice Ginsburg’s “dying wish” might actually have been written by a top Democrat like Representative Adam Schiff of California, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York or Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California. “I don’t know that she said that, or if that was written out by Adam Schiff, and Schumer and Pelosi,” Mr. Trump said. “That came out of the wind. It sounds so beautiful, but that sounds like a Schumer deal, or maybe Pelosi or Shifty Schiff.”

This baseless claim appears to be a Trump original. Questions about the legitimacy of Ms. Ginsburg’s “dying wish” were not circulating online in any significant way before his Fox News appearance. 

But after the appearance, social media has filled with false claims echoing Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theory, and taking it even further into the land of nonsense. On Twitter, users continued to spread their false claims that Ms. Ginsburg dictated the note to her “8-year-old granddaughter.” (Ms. Spera is a lawyer who graduated from Harvard Law School in 2017.) They have cast doubts on the integrity of NPR’s reporting. (Nina Totenberg, the NPR reporter who published the detail about Ms. Ginsburg’s last wish, is a longtime Supreme Court reporter who has been close to the Ginsburg family for decades.) And they have sought to portray Democrats spreading false rumors about Ms. Ginsburg’s death as part of a political power grab.

In an appearance on MSNBC on Monday, Ms. Totenberg confirmed her account of Ms. Ginsburg’s statement, and said that others in the room at the time witnessed her making it, including her doctor. “I checked,” Ms. Totenberg added, “because I’m a reporter.”

Mr. Schiff, one of the congressional Democrats Mr. Trump speculated might have invented Justice Ginsburg’s request, responded on Twitter, saying “Mr. President, this is low. Even for you.”

Liar in Chief

There is a reason why he is called “Liar in Chief.”

President Trump was asked directly today why he lied to the American people about the coronavirus pandemic.

The beginning of Trump's response: "I didn't lie."

That itself is a lie.

Trump admitted to journalist Bob Woodward in a March interview, for Woodward's new book Rage, that he had played down the severity of the situation to try to avoid a public panic. And he told Woodward in a February interview that the coronavirus was deadlier than even "strenuous flus" -- then went out weeks later and falsely told the public that the coronavirus "is a flu" and "like a flu."

Trump said again today that he had just wanted to keep Americans "calm." Regardless of how benign or malign his intentions were, however, deliberately giving people inaccurate information is a lie.

Rather than calming, Trump incites his supporters with panicky proclamations:
- A "caravan" of immigrants is moving menacingly towards the U.S.
- Trump suggested shooting migrants in the legs to slow them down.
- Mexicans are bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists.
- He tweets: Liberate Michigan! Liberate Minnesota! Liberate Virginia! [all states with Democratic governors]
- And the list goes on.

Trump Aces Memory Test

The back-story:

President Trump bragged that he passed a memory test:  The doctor read off a list of five things. A few minutes later Trump was asked to recite them back from memory. The president not only remembered them, but in the same order the doctor gave them, or so he said.

He quotes the doc saying “nobody does that,” proving that our president is not deteriorating because he is getting older.

The five words Trump needed to remember were: Person, man, woman, TV, camera.