2016 August 19^th

Paul Manafort is out of the Trump campaign so we won’t have Paul to kick around anymore. Oh Pshaw! Now we have to make do with that Breitbart boy…hey, no problem.

The arrival of the new team was supposed to mean that Trump was encouraged to go back to being Trump. Then we have the Kellyanne Conway (KC) influence, presumably softening Trump ever so slightly by making him apologize…sort of. Here is what Trump read from his teleprompter:

“Sometimes in the heat of debate, and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don’t choose the right words or you say the wrong thing. I have done that, and believe it or not I regret it. I do regret it particularly where it may have caused personal pain.”

That’s not an apology: that’s an excuse, read it carefully. “Sometimes in the heat of debate, and speaking on a multitude of issues…” allows Trump to excuse his boorishness. Whom was he “debating” when he mocked the disabled reporter…and then said he had done no such thing. He kept reporters penned up at his rallies and then pointed to one of them calling him a “scumbag.” He told his followers to “punch them in the face” when protesters were removed from his rally, all the while insisting he abhorred violence. He claims that he was “attacked” by a gold star father who asked him what he had sacrificed for his country. His response was to insult the man’s wife, mother of the fallen soldier. His response to the father’s question was that he had created jobs. He considers that a sacrifice?  Standard Trump nonsense.

Donald Trump says, “I will never lie to you.” Let’s see what he has said about Hillary Clinton not all that long ago and then what he says now: “Hillary Clinton I think is a terrific woman.” How about, “I know her very well, and I know her husband very well, and I like them both.” We also have, “Hillary is smart, tough, and a very nice person.” There is, “I know Hillary and I think she’d make a great president.”

Then Trump (who would never lie to us) says, “In Hillary Clinton’s America the system stays rigged against Americans . Syrian refugees flood in. Illegal immigrants convicted of committing crimes get to stay in, collecting Social Security skipping the line….It’s more of the same.”   

Which “truth” are you pushing now Mr. Trump?

Then we have Trump’s very different positions on Libya:
“I can’t believe what our country is doing,” said Trump on his video blog. “Qaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around we have soldiers all over the Middle East, and we’re not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage and that’s what it is: It’s a carnage.”

Then during the campaign, Donald Trump came down hard on the Obama administration for intervening in Libya to help topple Muammar Qaddafi. Trump now says, for example, that the world would be better off with Qaddafi in power. Indeed, he has argued that “frankly there is no Libya; it’s all broken up; they have no control; nobody knows what’s going on.”

Which is the “truth?” They are both the truth for Donald Trump. For Trump the truth is whatever he has most recently said. Once he has heard himself say it, those words become the truth for Donald Trump. It’s an illness.