I believe all this and more because the alternative is unthinkable: that our great nation inflicted on the world a president who is, well, a stone cold loser, boorish and ignorant.
...........
Worse yet, Trump is not an inspiring speaker while reading from a prepared text.
And
I am fully prepared to believe Trump tomorrow if he says âI never
called Sadiq Khan a âstone cold loserâââ â even though Trump, landing in
Britain on Monday, called the London mayor just that in a tweet that misspelled Khanâs name and also mocked him for being short.
I
believe all this and more because the alternative is unthinkable: that
our great nation inflicted on the world a president who is, well, a
stone cold loser, boorish and ignorant.
Therefore
I plan to do as Trump does: live today as if yesterday never happened.
But itâs not enough to imagine away this weekâs name-calling. To
preserve national dignity, Americans must accept that none of the
following ever happened:
He didnât refer to Brussels as a âhellholeâ nor assert that âBelgium is a beautiful city.â And spelling the British prime ministerâs name as that of a British porn actress? Never happened.
His
administration didnât confuse Singapore with Indonesia and China with
Taiwan, nor misidentify the Australian prime minister, nor misspell âDenmark.â Not once did Trump vow to âpromote the possibility of lasting peachâ in the Middle East.
Trump, furthermore, did not sign the guest book at Israelâs Holocaust memorial with the words âso amazing.â
He didnât pull his name from a Group of Seven communique. He didnât
take a limousine and a golf cart instead of walking with other world
leaders at summits. He didnât struggle with a group handholding exercise
in Manila, his knuckles didnât whiten in the grip of Emmanuel Macron, and Melania Trump did not swat his hand away on the tarmac in Tel Aviv.
Furthermore,
Trump did not reveal secret Israeli intelligence to Russia. He didnât
accuse Germany of being âtotally controlled by Russia.â He didnât taunt the French over street protests, attack the idea of NATO, use an all-caps tweet to threaten Iran with annihilation, hail âfantasticâ strongmen nor pine for the reign of Moammar Gaddafi.
Fortunately,
it has all been a misunderstanding. For if an American president had
actually done even a fraction of the above, it would be an indelible
national disgrace.
Put the chart to Daily and it illustrates a rather nice crescendo of lies up until the 2018 Mid-term elections are over. That said, the frequency of lying is higher in the post- Mid-term election period than it was prior to July 2018.
Does the President lie more when he feels frustrated or is he lying more because past experience has convinced him of the efficacy of lying? Hopefully greater analytical minds than mine will tackle this crucial, thorny question.
P.S. When are Trump supporters going to wake up and understand the damage being inflicted upon the American brand?
in fact: To claim 3.1 per cent growth, Trump was using an alternative growth measure that compares one quarter of the year to one quarter of the previous year; he compared the fourth quarter of 2018 to the fourth quarter of 2017. (By the traditional measure of real GDP growth, the 2018 growth rate was 2.9 per cent.) Some economists think that is a superior measure, so Trump wasn't objectively being deceiving by using it — but he was being deceiving by saying this was the "best number in 14 years." As the New York Times and Washington Post noted, this was not "the first time in 14 years" that there was 3.1 per cent growth using this quarter-to-quarter measure; in fact, it happened just four years ago, in 2015. The Post wrote: "Now that Trump is citing 4Q/4Q, that means the relevant comparison would not just be 4Q/4Q but other quarter-over-quarter calculations. The economy under Obama hit its peak in 1Q/1Q 2015, when it grew 3.8 per cent. Obama exceeded 3.1 per cent on two other occasions, as well."
Reilly, a former Sports Illustrated columnist who has played with Trump in the past, spoke to dozens of players â both amateur and professional â to recount some of the presidentâs worst cons on the course, starting with his declared handicap of 2.8.
In laymanâs terms, the lower the handicap, the better the player. Jack Nicklaus, winner of a record 18 major golf titles and generally considered the greatest golfer in the history of the game, has a handicap of 3.4.
Nicklausâ handicap is listed on the same Golf Handicap and Information Network website used by Trump, where players post their scores.
âIf Trump is a 2.8,â writes Reilly, âQueen Elizabeth is a pole vaulter.â
Gives incorrect number of home lots in California At that point, only 36 lots were actually approved for sale, and by this point 5 had already been sold. That left 31 â not 55 â available for sale. Since Trump was promising he could sell them for at least $3 million each, there was a $72 million gap between his claims and reality.
Now, one of the things that I did with President Xi in China when I met him in Argentina at a summit (Dec. 2018)â before I even started talking about trade â it was a trade meeting, went very well, but before I talked about trade I talked about something more important.
I said listen, we have tremendous amounts of fentanyl coming into our country, kills tens of thousands of people, I think far more than anybody registers. And I'd love you to declare it a lethal drug and put it on your criminal list, and their criminal list is much tougher than our criminal list.
Their criminal list, a drug dealer gets a thing called the death penalty. Our criminal list, a drug dealer gets a thing called how about a fine? And when I asked President Xi, I said do you have a drug problem? No, no, no, I said you have 1.4 billion people, what do you mean you have no drug problem?
No we don't have a drug problem. I said why? Death penalty. We give death penalty to people that sell drugs, end of problem. What do we do? We set up a blue ribbon communities. Lovely men and women, they sit around a table, they have lunch, they eat, they dine and they waste a lot of time.
So if we want to get smart, we can get smart. You can end the drug problem â can end it a lot faster than you think. But President Xi's agreed to put fentanyl on his list of deadly, deadly drugs, and it's a criminal penalty and the penalty is death.
