America's Biggest Liar Is Now America's Biggest Flip-Flopper
I’ve mentioned before, it seems impossible for Biden or Kamala to navigate a debate with Trump’s uniqueness as an inveterate liar. Nothing he says relates to the concept of Truth. He’ll say anything at all at any time and the opposite to another audience an hour later. PolitiFact has awarded him Lie of the Year in 2015, 2017 and 2019. They have fact checked over 1,000 of his public statements and determined he lies more than any other politician since fact checks became a thing. 75% of his statements are false. Only 11% are true of mostly true. The rest are half true/half false. On the extremes, 18% of his statements were “Pants on Fire” grade lies— and 36 statements were true. Other fact-checkers have had similar results.
One that has come to light this week was the Project 2025 big lie. Last year, once word started leaking out about Project 2025, it slowly began getting very unpopular with more and more Americans. Eventually, Trump felt a need to disown it and then, at least appear, to shut it down. Of course, it was all a ruse by Trump to claim plausible deniability. Three Washington Post star reporters, Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey and Hannah Knowles, broke the story that “in April 2022, Trump shared a 45-minute private flight with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, according to people familiar with the trip, plane-tracking data and a photograph from on board the plane, which has not been previously reported. They flew together to a Heritage conference where Trump delivered a keynote address that gestured to Heritage’s forthcoming policy proposals. ‘They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do,’ Trump said in the speech. In interview in April Roberts told The Post “that he had previously discussed Project 2025 with Trump as part of offering briefings to all presidential candidates. ‘I personally have talked to President Trump about Project 2025,’ he said in the interview, ‘because my role in the project has been to make sure that all of the candidates who have responded to our offer for a briefing on Project 2025 get one from me.’” [The Trump campaign denies Trump was briefed by Roberts but the staffer who asserted that is Karoline Leavitt, a notorious and consistent liar.]
Since then, Señor T “has repeatedly denied knowing about the Project 2025 policy blueprint or the people behind it. ‘Have no idea who is in charge of it,’ he wrote in a social media post in July.
The flight, Trump’s speech and Roberts’s interview cut against the former president’s recent efforts to distance himself from Project 2025 once Democrats turned some of its most controversial proposals into a frequent campaign attack. The proposals came from alumni of Trump’s first term and often overlap with his own official campaign pronouncements, such as eliminating the Education Department, weakening protections for career civil servants, ending affirmative action and reversing restrictions on greenhouse gases. One of the proposals calls for federal restrictions on access to abortion medication, a position at odds with the Trump campaign stance.
“Project 2025 has never and will never be an accurate reflection of President Trump’s policies,” Leavitt said…
Trump briefly described meeting Heritage staff members during his keynote address at the conference. “With Kevin and the staff, and I met so many of them now, I took pictures with among the most handsome, beautiful people I’ve ever seen,” he said.
…Roberts has told people Trump isn’t really that mad, instead attributing the backlash to top Trump campaign advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles.
“Some chapter writers see this as a disaster, a catastrophe, that it’s really bad for them. Others think it’s going to blow over,” the person involved in the project said. “The wishful-thinking school is that this will all blow over.”
…The coalition involved at least 140 Trump administration alumni, according to a CNN tally, including Dans, former White House speechwriter Stephen Miller, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan and former White House budget director Russ Vought.
…Trump and his advisers chafed at the critical media coverage that Project 2025 generated, especially when leaders including Roberts brushed off repeated warnings to keep their heads down. Roberts himself drew backlash for a July interview on the right-wing War Room podcast (which was hosted by former Trump adviser Stephen Bannon until he reported to prison), in which he said, “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Miller has started forcefully denying any role in the project. His America First Legal group was part of the coalition, and his deputy, Gene Hamilton, wrote the playbook’s chapter on the Justice Department. Others, such as Vought, who wrote the chapter on the executive office of the president and served as policy director for the Republican National Convention’s platform committee, have kept a lower profile since the Trump campaign started admonishing the project.
Others whom Trump specifically said he would consider bringing back into a second administration contributed chapters to the project, including former adviser Peter Navarro on trade; former acting defense secretary Christopher Miller on the Pentagon; and former HUD secretary Ben Carson on housing. Navarro served four months in prison over his refusal to testify before Congress about efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Roberts also has a relationship with Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), who wrote the foreword to Roberts’s book, Dawn’s Early Light. In the foreword, Vance called Heritage “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.” On Tuesday, Roberts announced that he would delay [as in cover up] publication until after the election.
Another day in Trump-world. Reporting for the NY Times yesterday, Alan Rappeport wrote that in recent days Trump has changed his mind whenever it seemed politically convenient. When he was in the White House, he “tried to take tips away from workers and give the money to their employers… In 2017, Trump’s Labor Department proposed changing federal regulations to allow employers to collect tips that their workers receive and use them for essentially any purpose as long as the workers were paid at least the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. In theory, the flexibility would make it possible for restaurant owners to ensure that cooks and dishwashers received part of a pool of tip money, but in practice employers could pocket the tips and spend them at their discretion.” Now he says he wants to eliminate taxes on tips, hoping to woo low income workers who depend on tips. “The reversal,” wrote Rappeport, “is one of many that Trump has made in his bid to return to the presidency and underscores his malleability in election-year policymaking. From TikTok to cryptocurrencies, the former president has been reinventing his platform on the fly as he aims to attract different swaths of voters. At times, Trump appears to be staking out new positions to differentiate himself from Harris or, perhaps, just to please crowds.
Trump has been open to selling off policy announcements to billionaires. Crooked Philadelphia scumbag Jeff Yass bribed Trump to do a 180 on TikTok. The crypto-criminals paid Trump off to switch his position on BitCoin. Elon Must gave Trump tens of millions of dollars to get him to say he now favors electric vehicles.
So Does Trump actually stand for something? Oh yes— two things in fact: staying out of prison and stuffing his pockets— the story of his life.
He stands for a third thing: being worshipped as a god. When god lies, nobody cares.
Media are pathetically silent on P2025. It should be front page stuff every day and it should be dissected and examined with a microscope. And the close associations between its authors and the trumps should be stressed. NONE of this is true.
DITTO trump's promise to his voters that they'll only have to vote this time and never again.
IF the media were doing their jobs, and trump was elected anyway, about the only thing one could say is that americans truly are dumber than shit. Because media have abdicated their responsibilities in a democracy, it's only PROBABLY because voters are dumber than shit.