President Trump’s shifting positions and outright lies have presented the American public with dueling narratives at every turn.
“He says so much, you can’t really pin him down,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a Princeton history professor and editor of a book of essays about Mr. Trump’s first term. “The point isn’t to have a contradiction, the point is to have cover.”
Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of Mr. Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal,” has said the president has one goal. “His aim is never accuracy,” Mr. Schwartz wrote in an opinion essay during Mr. Trump’s first term, “it’s domination.”
Experts say the dissonance can become dangerous. “Once you undermine consistency, the shared sense of reality, you’re undermining the basis of democracy,” said Jason Stanley, a Yale professor who has written books about propaganda and the erasure of history. “If there’s no shared sense of reality, we can’t collectively make decisions. So the only decision maker will be the disrupter in chief.”
Mr. Stanley said Mr. Trump’s contradictions boil down to a simple truth.
“If you’re constantly contradicting yourself,” he said, “you’re constantly lying.”
A excellent example of this is that today Traitorapist Trump “threatened” to put tariffs on Russa so that people will forget he was compromised by the KGB in 1987. Biden already put a full embargo on most trade with Russia. So Trump’s “threats” with tariffs (WTF LOL??) are a total joke. Remember Russia already got everything they wanted from Treason Trump. This comes after Trump not only stopped sending Ukraine aid, he vindictively stopped supplying them with intelligence and satellite information and ordered US intelligence services to stop defending against Russian operations targeting the US and Europe. The minimum credible threat would be to undo all that. The actual purpose of the “threat” is to fool people into thinking that Treason Trump is not the stooge of War Criminal Putin and an enemy of the free world.