On November 20th of nineteen seventy-five former President and patron saint of the Republican Party, Ronald Reagan said, “we must offer…the truth instead of promises.”
Between his late night twitter rants and re-reading the 27 books of the New Testament for kicks, Donald Trump apparently missed the passage on truth just after the Reagan 11th commandment. I have often said to friends, Mr. Trump starts each speech with a very easily provable lie and then builds a scenario around the imagined disasters swirling about his hair and in his head. I assume that as part of his campaign’s staff now umpteenth reset of him, he has come to the conclusion (at least for today) that admitting he was wrong is actually admirable, hark the herald! As part of a restitution settlement with the Iranian Government in January, President Barack Obama saved approximately nine-hundred million dollars. In a longstanding lawsuit instigated by the Iranians over an undelivered weapons cache that was paid for prior to the fall of the Shah in February of 1979, the US was obligated to either legally refund the payment or deliver the merchandise. Obviously we were not going to deliver what would be the equivalent of 1.3 billion dollars of arms to a sponsor of state terrorism.
The Iranians had filed suit for nearly 10 billion dollars for what a layman would call, breach of contract and had better than a 50/50 chance of winning. So it could be argued that potentially the President saved upwards of 9.6 billion dollars had the case been allowed to run its course. Enter the Orange Maven of misinformation, Donald John Trump. Much like his purported sighting of dancing Islamist on the roof tops of New Jersey apartment buildings celebrating 9/11, his sighting of four-hundred million dollars being clandestinely flown into Iran was again a figment of his warped imagination. Today he finally admitted to a mistake. He was confused by previously recorded stock file footage often used by TV stations of the prisoner exchange. I will admit when I first saw glimpses of the plane I took notice and said to myself, “what is this”? The dangerous part of Mr. Trump, is that he has no intellectual curiosity. I took a moment to “watch the shows” and even with my limited knowledge of foreign policy was quickly able to determine, after about three minutes of Google investigation, what I had actually seen. There were no packages of money being carried from the plane as Mr. Trump suggested, just happy former hostages clutching their meager belongings after, for some, many years of captivity. Just days before, Trump was interviewed and talked about a letter he had received from the NFL and how the pro football conglomerate was displeased with the debate schedule and how it would compete for ratings with two of their games. Uh nope, the NFL has no knowledge of Mr. Trump’s claim and categorically denied any such letter was ever sent or even contemplated.
This is an ongoing pattern for candidate Trump, first the lie, trashing the reputation of the lie’s focus, clarification from his surrogates, vilification of the news media for reporting the lie, then on to the next lie [ Google the Big Lie Theory]. Time after time this has happened with his sycophants egging him on. Esteemed writer David Ignatius outlined this phenomenon in an article based on psychological studies by among others Charles Lord, he called it “confirmation bias.” In a nutshell it is taking in only the information that sanctions our preconceived favoritism toward someone we like, to the exclusion of all other contrary factual information. That subtle power over people in the hands of a narcissist like Mr. Trump can be dangerous and unchecked, disastrous.
Vote 2016!