Former President Donald Trump told an entirely fictional story on Saturday about how he had supposedly outwitted his Democratic opponents by releasing “the tape” of the 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that was a key factor in Trump’s first impeachment.
…
Facts First: Trump’s story is a complete fabrication. No tape of his call with Zelensky was ever released; Pelosi could not possibly have been angry with her allies after hearing a tape of the call because she has never heard a tape of the call. In fact, as of nearly five years after the July 2019 call, there is no known US recording of the conversation. What Trump’s White House actually released in September 2019 was a rough written transcript of the call — which corroborated, rather than contradicted, a government whistleblower’s central allegations about what Trump had said. Pelosi spokesperson Aaron Bennett said Sunday that Trump’s story is “fact-free nonsense.”
I mean fuck it. I say we start demanding that he release the tape. Stop treating him like a fucking dotard.
He ate it.
I mean, yeah, but that’s just playing rational defense against his idiocy.
We should be playing rationally irrational offense. They are straight up making things up. So sane people should make things up in response, but at the same time be careful to make the fabrications close enough to reality (or even just a misrepresentation of reality) that they gain traction.
Seriously: astroturfing shit that stupid people will believe is very obviously a valid political tactic these days. And the right has been aggressively playing that game for a while now, which is why they seem to have an impenetrable 30–ish% approval rating as a floor.
I’m with you, but what could possibly be said about Trump that his followers wouldn’t dismiss as “fake news” or outright praise him for. They don’t even care that he’s a rapist.
It’s not about them believing any one story in particular. It’s about moving the median point of the atmosphere they’re immersed in subtly in a less awful direction.
More directly: I’m saying we should be using dirty tricks to move the Overton window in a more positive and constructive direction, because they’ve been using the same tricks in the interest of increasing wealth disparity and concentration for decades.
“Don’t you think he looks tired?”
I heard he won’t release the tapes even though he did nothing criminally wrong, because in the middle he fully pisses himself in the oval office and rex tillerson was like “dude don wtf”
CNNNNnnnnnnnn . . . . what did we say?
What did we say last time, CNN? Hmmm?
YOU HAVE TO USE THE WORD “LIE” CNN. In the headline. Okay?
It’s three letters, it’s a simple word, there’s absolutely NO reason not to use it unless you’re just flat out admitting your republiQan masters refuse to allow it.
LIED. He Lied. Again. CNN. Do your fucking job, CNN.
"eww but that ewwpensus up to leeeegallll challlengeee"SHUT UP. DO IT. GODDAMN.
CNN is owned by a conservative who is almost certainly meddling in their editorial policy.
He just presents patriotic alternative truths.
It doesn’t matter. His base will believe it, even though it is verifiably false. Trump has proven that he is incapable of sticking to the truth once he latches on to a convenient lie, even if it costs him millions of dollars to keep lying.
The only question is whether enough of the rest of the country will find a reason to go along, too.
1984 is no longer fictional, it’s the cookbook for today’s GOP
We’ve always been at war with The Woke Agenda. We’ve never been at war with Russia.
So does he lie on purpose or does he just believe his own lies so confidently he is mixing up his imagination with reality.
I’m convinced Trump’s mind doesn’t work like that, and that his memories are heavily slanted by how he perceived his role in the event. Others’ roles or the factual details are arranged automatically by his brain to fill this role he sees himself playing.
No one surely ever challenged him on his constant nonsense, so he’s had a lifetime of reinforcement over this behaviour.
As he’s aging however the detachment between his perception and recollection of an event is growing much larger, and the result is these wild made-up tales…
Yes. He isn’t concerned with the concepts of lying or telling the truth or even being coherent and rational. He simply states whatever he needs to at a given moment to elevate himself or give himself an advantage. I don’t think he goes through the rational pause most people do before they lie. He doesn’t think about it at all.
In the past it was on purpose. Nowadays it is a mix because he is demented.
I think there’s always been plenty of believing his own bullshit going on.
He lies on purpose because his followers will believe absolutely anything he says.
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There are four lights.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Former President Donald Trump told an entirely fictional story on Saturday about how he had supposedly outwitted his Democratic opponents by releasing “the tape” of the 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that was a key factor in Trump’s first impeachment.
Trump claimed that Pelosi was told, “Let’s just pretend he did and keep going forward.” He continued, “After they made up the story and then after that they heard the tape, they died.
Retired Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who was one of the officials listening to Trump’s call with Zelensky in his role at the time as the top Ukraine expert for the White House’s National Security Council (and who later became an important witness in the impeachment inquiry), told CNN in a text message on Sunday that there is “no recording” of the call.
But that Trump claim never made any sense, either — because, in reality, he released the rough transcript before Schiff gave his exaggerated rendition of it at a congressional hearing.
In Trump’s 2019 versions of the story, he claimed that Pelosi had been dismayed with her allies after she read the rough transcript, not after she listened to “the tape.” But there was no basis even for that claim; after the rough transcript was released, Pelosi issued a scathing statement accusing Trump of “lawlessness” and attempting “to shake down other countries for the benefit of his campaign.” A Pelosi spokesperson told CNN in 2019 that Trump’s account of her supposed thoughts was “complete fiction.”
He told the “tape” version of the story while again bashing Schiff, who is now running for a US Senate seat in California.
The original article contains 716 words, the summary contains 269 words. Saved 62%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
