"Trump's brutishness is inexhaustible."
Trump’s Sinister Assault on Truth
The president appears committed to destroying the very idea of facts.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/donald-trumps-sinister-assault-truth/591925/
The least problematic part is the sheer banality of Donald Trump’s words. During his presidency, Trump has uttered no beautiful and memorable phrases. His inaugural address, which is a speech normally meant to inspire the citizenry, is remembered, if at all, for the phrase American carnage and Trump’s description of a dystopian nation, broken and shattered. More worrisome is that many of Trump’s utterances are an incoherent word salad. If you read the transcript of many of his interviews and extemporaneous speeches, you often find that Trump is not only unable to lay out a coherent argument; at times he’s unable to string together sentences that parse.
But that’s hardly the worst of Trump’s misuses of words. When it comes to dealing with those who oppose him, he consistently uses words to demean, belittle, bully, or dehumanize. He has mocked former prisoners of war, the disabled, and the appearance of women. He has perpetuated conspiracy theories. He has attacked Gold Star parents and widows. And he has engaged in racially tinged attacks. The number of his targets is inexhaustible because Trump’s brutishness is inexhaustible.
Many other presidents have been viewed as divisive figures, but none have taken as much delight as Trump in provoking acrimony, malice, and bitterness for their own sake; in turning Americans against one another in order to turn them against one another. He seems to find psychic satisfaction in doing so.
The banality and weaponization of Trump’s words are bad enough, but the greatest cause for concern is his nonstop, dawn-to-midnight assault on facts, truth, reality. That places Trump in a sinister category all his own.
Many politicians are guilty of not telling the full truth of events. A significant number shade the truth from time to time. A few fall into the category of consistent, outright liars. But only very few—and only the most dangerous—are committed to destroying the very idea of truth itself. That is what we have in Donald Trump, along with many of his aides and courtiers. We saw it at the dawn of the Trump presidency, when he insisted—and sent out his press secretary to insist—that the crowd size at his inauguration was larger than that of Barack Obama’s, despite photographic evidence to the contrary. And that behavior has continued virtually every day since.
----
Trump is not simply a serial liar; he is attempting to murder the very idea of truth, which is even worse. “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda,” according to the Russian dissident and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov. “It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
This is an urgent matter, and it makes this a dangerous moment because without truth and a common factual basis for our national life, a free society cannot operate. And right now, for a significant number of Americans—including many people on the right who long defended the concept of objective truth and repeatedly rang the alarm bell about the rise of relativism—truth is viewed as relative rather than objective, malleable rather than solid; as instrumental, as a means to an end, as a weapon in our intense political war. A depressingly large number of Trump supporters—again, many of whom have for years agreed with the conservative political philosopher Allan Bloom that relativism was impoverishing our souls—now seem to relish this “post-truth” political moment.
= new reply since forum marked as read
who bought the shite in the General Election that there was no difference between Hillary and Trump?
Looking at you Sarandon and Killer Mike.. along with all the other purveyors of this gaslighting nonsense.
Not on this side of the fence, thank you......
Republican heads spin so much they need ball bearing in their necks.....
Come join our world of reality if you dare, Rethugs.......
