The self-proclaimed Democratic “resistance” to Donald Trump has been full of outright lies and misleading information. The result of this is that people – the people who have to actually be convinced of this fact – are blinded to the actual threat posed by Donald Trump’s presidency and the promises he has made.
Lies are easily unraveled unless the lie becomes part of someone’s reality. It is easy to convince someone that the world is warming, unless they have made it an integral part of their reality that this is not and cannot be happening. Likewise, when you lie about Donald Trump, while those who have made it an integral part of their reality that whomever the Republican Party nominated must be completely and irrevocably evil may eat them up, people who are able to be convinced that Donald Trump is doing something wrong can easily see through them with the slightest bit of information.
No, there is no reason to believe that Donald Trump is a Russian pawn. It is completely irrelevant how big his inaugural crowd was, especially when a protest was actively preventing people from attending his inauguration. No his tariff idea will not end up costing your average American to pay for his silly wall. I have seen several stories about Donald Trump’s staff having private e-mail addresses with the Republican National Committee – but I have yet to see one that shows them conducting official business on them – which is where the scandal would be. I am not saying there is no such story, but that I could not find it when culling through reporting about it.
I have been spending much of my time writing defending Donald Trump against absolutely ridiculous claims when I once wrote that I was fully expecting that I may end up in prison or dead in the next four years under a Trump presidency – for attacking him. Instead, I find myself having to tell the truth about the silly things that get more attention than the actual scandals. I am sick of it – but I’m not going to stop defending Donald Trump when he is attacked unfairly – I want him to stop being attacked unfairly and instead see him attacked for the right reasons.
There are very serious things happening already in the Trump presidency that need to be discussed much more, and hopefully I’ll have time in the future to expand upon them. But these things are hidden underneath the partisan bickering and so people end up unaware of them.
The Guardian reported that six journalists were arrested and charged with inciting a riot , a felony, while covering the protests during Donald Trump’s inauguration. These journalists were simply doing their jobs of covering events and the charges are clear first amendment violations. They were simply there, with press credentials, and recording what was happening. Amongst the arrested was Alexander Rubinstein of Russia Today – but let’s focus on a silly narrative that Trump is a Russian pawn and ignore the very scary thing actually happening – which we actually should know about. Perhaps we’ll focus on a ridiculous women’s march which, once Democrats signed on, turned against sex workers and trans women, a slap in the face of intersectionalism.
One of the things he thought most important was to immediately enact a hiring freeze on civilian federal agencies, whom are already struggling with growing workloads with decimated workforces from hiring freezes and attrition during the last eight years. This is a purposeful castration of legitimate government programs, as a first priority, but which no one seems as concerned about as much as him having a lower inaugural turnout than Barack Obama.
He has made many appointments and almost all of them have a conflict of interest with the agency they have been placed in charge of – and Charlie Schumer is voting yea on all of them – something not unique to Trump, but the magnitude and blatancy is unprecidented. Yet, we get some sporadic coverage about this, perhaps about how Betsy DeVos, an advocate for dismantling our public school system by replacing them with private schools or charter schools, mentioned a grizzly bear concern – which was a real concern for the school she mentioned – in her hearing. While she was trying to avert a question rather tactlessly, the bear wasn’t the story that needed to be told. She isn’t comically inept, she is a very scary human being. Oddly, Politifact , an organization whose comprehension of facts has become very questionable over the last year, rated Betsy’s statement that she “would imagine” they have a gun false , because Betsy imagined wrong.
This is by no means a full list.
There are real threats to things that Trump is doing, and it really may be more of an issue with him being easily manipulated by those close to him as an article from the Washington Post suggests, but frames in a completely different manner. However, we will never see them coming if Democrats insist on muddying the waters and ignoring the fact that they actually agree with many of the very dangerous things that Trump is doing.
Remember, there are actual people who need to be convinced to be on guard – they will soon start dismissing all attacks on Trump as mere partisan bickering if this ridiculousness does not end. We cannot let their minds go immediately on the defensive whenever they hear criticism of Donald Trump – a trick I’m pretty sure Hillary Clinton employed by having Donald Trump attack her flaws in such outrageous ways that many Democratic supporters wouldn’t take any criticism of her seriously. How many people, that supported either, understand today that the e-mail scandal was about maintaining government records and being held accountable for actions performed in office? It is only through honest discussion of Donald Trump that these individuals will not recede into a defensive stance.
Let me emulate Martin Luther King’s words when I say you cannot drive out lies with lies; only truth can do that.
[Featured Image by Pool/Getty Images]