Time was when getting caught in a malicious lie about a rival would have ended an American politician’s career. We no longer live that way. Just the other day, Donald Trump unleashed a series of falsehoods attacking President Biden that would have shamed a carnival barker.
Speaking to a rally in South Dakota, Trump delivered a series of mocking claims, beginning with the allegation that the administration was using made-up jobs numbers when the truth is that only 2.1 million jobs have been created during the president’s 30 months in office. The actual statistics show somewhere over 13 million—including near-record growth in GDP (Gross Domestic Product) during the recovery from the 2020 Covid slump.
Then Trump got personal. “He makes up these stories, like there’s a picture of a fighter jet…[mocking] You know like ‘I used to be a fighter jet pilot.’ Then there’s a picture of a truck. ‘I used to drive a truck.’ The worst is, did you ever see his golf swing? He said he’s a six-handicap! A six handicap is a good golfer. This guy can’t hit a ball… I think that’s the biggest lie of all, if you want to know the truth.”
Trump shakes his head in feigned disbelief as the crowd laughs and applauds. (Never mind that there’s a best-selling book by veteran sportswriter Rick Reilly called Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump describing how he races down fairways in his golf cart, kicks opponent’s balls into ponds, drops his own onto the green, etc. Filled with interviews of golf pros and caddies, it’s actually quite funny.)
So is Trump’s performance, or would be if you didn’t know—South Dakota isn’t exactly a golfing hotbed—that every single word of it is a malicious lie. Joe Biden has never claimed to be a truck driver or a fighter pilot. Don’t you think you’d have heard?
Biden has mostly made self-deprecating jokes about his golf game, commenting that “the course record remains intact” after his initial outing as president. Back in 2018 he carried a USGA handicap of 6.7, according to Golf News Net, which is pretty good—no surprise as Biden was an accomplished athlete as a young man. But he’s never boasted about it.
Anyway, who cares? As a politician, Trump himself is treated by audiences and reporters alike as a stand-up comic. Which would be fine if he stuck to stage performances. Alas, polls show that millions of gullible Americans believe even the most absurd of his inventions. Deep-thinking pundits are writing columns about Biden’s great unpopularity, which reality-oriented blogger Kevin Drum shows is largely a function of false memories.
I like Drum because he’s an engineer by training who lives in Orange County, California and is congenitally immune to inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom. Recently he posted a graph comparing the “favorability” ratings of the last several presidents at the equivalent point in their respective administrations. It turns out that they all hovered in the forties. It comes with the territory. Biden’s in no worse shape politically than Clinton, Obama, or Trump.
Only George W. Bush, thanks to the strong patriotic surge in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, was in better shape. However, Dubya’s disastrous second term drove his approval down to 24 percent by 2008.
So, no President Biden isn’t deeply unpopular with the public, and certainly not in comparison with Trump, whose negatives are markedly worse even in Fox News surveys. That said, polls mean very little at this point in the election cycle, and have pretty much failed to predict the results in any of the last several national contests.
Remember the vaunted “Red Wave” in 2022? Never happened. People pretty much don’t answer their phones unless they know who’s calling. The whole business of public opinion polling is an increasingly shaky enterprise.
I suspect it’s pretty much the same with the whole Fox News-generated Hunter Biden saga. Supposedly a majority of Americans believes Joe Biden has violated the law in his dealings with his wayward son. Apart from not paying his taxes on time, however, it isn’t even clear what crimes the younger Biden’s alleged to have committed. It’s not against the law to work for a foreign corporation, nor to drop Daddy’s name in business meetings.
If it were, there wouldn’t be a Trump sibling walking around free, much less cashing humungous checks from Saudi Arabia.
Doting father that he is, I quite doubt that Joe Biden fills out Hunter’s IRS form 1040. Nor that after decades in public life with no sign of financial impropriety, he suddenly got greedy in his 70s. However, Fox News imagineers appear to have persuaded millions of viewers that with all the manure they’ve shoveled, there must be a pony.
Gullible cynicism regarding politicians is always fashionable. But if they go ahead and impeach the president, they’d better produce that pony.
Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of The Hunting of the President.
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Kamala Harris Grills DHS Chief On Racist Remarks And White Nationalist Threat
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) sparred with Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen over the president’s racist remarks — and the administration official’s apparent support for those views.
Nielsen said earlier Tuesday during testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that the president was simply repeating an observation about hard-working Norwegian immigrants, but Harris said Trump was unfavorably comparing them to African and Haitian immigrants.
“You spoke of them, according to the president, as the people of Norway — well, you know, they work very hard — the inference being the people of the 54 states of Africa and Haiti do not,” Harris said. “That is a fair inference.”
She then blasted Nielsen’s claim under oath that she was not aware that Norway was a majority white nation.
“You run the Department of Homeland Security,” Harris continued, “and when you say you don’t know if Norway is predominantly white when asked by a member of the United States Senate, that causes me concern about your ability to understand the scope of your responsibilities and the impact of your words — much less the policies that you promulgate in that very important department.”
Harris asked Nielsen why she ignored domestic terrorist attacks by white supremacists in her opening remarks about security threats faced by the U.S. — and she said the omission was “deeply troubling.”
“You must understand the inference, the reasonable inference, that the American public is drawing from the words you speak much less the words of the president of the United States,” Harris said.
Nielsen later complained that Harris had unfairly drawn conclusions based on her testimony.
“If you don’t mind, it’s not a fair inference to say that my comments about Norway were in contrast to any other country,” Nielsen said. “What I was describing was the president’s views upon meeting with the prime minister, and what I was quoting was what he was told in meeting with the Norwegian delegation. That’s what he repeated, words that he repeated that I repeated. It was not in contrast. With respect to white supremacy, we expanded our prevention efforts in the Department of Homeland Security to ensure we in fact are going after violence of any kind, any kind is not appropriate and I will not allow it to occur if it’s within our authority to stop.”
Harris made one brief response before ceding the floor.
“Mr. Chairman, I would just ask that the record — so we can all review it — will reflect in the opening statements when discussing challenges to our homeland in terms of security, the white supremacist threat was not mentioned,” Harris said.