The Great Lie: A Response to My Critic

 The Great Lie: A Response to My Critic

I appreciate the impassioned pushback last week’s letter writer offered on my May 30 letter on President Trump’s justification of North Korean leader’s slander of “low IQ” Joe Biden and Trump’s dismissal of North Korea’s recent weapons missile launch while ignoring his own foreign policy team’s concerns.  In that letter, I also pointed to some key symptoms of clinical narcissism, illustrating that in his behavior and his words, the president checks all the boxes in each of the ones listed. As stated, I am not offering an official diagnosis, but am far from alone in showing the close correspondence at the level of symptomology between the president’s words and actions and clinical narcissism.  Based on this, I laid out the hypothesis that Trump’s need for personal confirmation may well be at the basis on his claim that he could establish sound foreign policy with North Korea based on his own magnetic personality. It is more than coincidental that Kim Jong Un mirrored Trump’s “low IQ” slur that the president has despicably uttered against Rep. Maxine Waters, of CA in his “hit job” (Trump’s phrase) against VP Biden, likely figuring that Trump would take the bait.  Ever lowering himself to the occasion, that is exactly what he did. This was the substance of my May 30 letter and I would have expected that a critic would take on something of the substance of my letter. 

That is precisely what last week’s letter writer failed to do. Rather, the writer seems to have an uncanny grasp of my underlying motivation “to spark” a “public uprising” that would get the president “immediately expelled” from office.  This is truly an astounding assertion based on what conceivable power a letter writer to the EH Gazette could conceivably exert, along with the unseemly specter of yielding the presidency to Mike Pence.  Oh, give me Trump any day.

The writer’s primary assertion is that my letter can be subsumed under a singular motivation, unbridled, irrational “hate.”  This is a claim that mirrors various talking points from Trump and Fox News.  Namely, the entire Democratic party, the mainstream news print and cable outlets, and key leadership in the FBI and CIA (including Trump-appointed personnel) singularly obsessed with Trump’s unexpected victory over Hillary Clinton, are engaged in some overarching cabal to bring the president down.

A key axiom in contemporary propaganda tactics is to issue a very bold and simplistic falsehood over and over again through all mediums available until at least a significant percentage of the population either believes it or is sufficiently confused that it can no longer draw a rational conclusion.  Thus, Trump’s manipulating demagoguery—“fake news,” “enemy of the American people,” “hoax,” “18 angry Democrats,” the picture of Bob Mueller as “conflicted,” if not downright corrupt, mirrored on the Fox News echo chamber, Trump’s primary source of information for shaping his “political philosophy.” 

If there is no there there we would expect a different behavior pattern from the President.  Instead, we get doubling down, obfuscation, directives to current and former staff to refuse to testify before Congress, refusal to provide tax records even while required by law to do so, an Attorney General acting more like the president’s personal attorney than the nation’s chief law officer who purposely attempted to mislead the public on the key findings of the Mueller Report.  What we do have is the public record based on the president’s own words and actions, over two years of investigative journalism, the Mueller Report, and a great deal that is not yet disclosed.  And we have a president who will not even unambiguously acknowledge that Russia interfered in the election in his favor, as documented in Part One of the Mueller Report.

So this is all fake news, a hoax, a “progressive” conspiracy, a result of the singular emotion of hate in response to the unexpected Trump victory in 2016.

Give me a break!

2019


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