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JUNE 13, 2022

Meyerson on TAP

'Detached From Reality'-When Was Trump Ever Attached?

In the Trump White House, truth-tellers were shown the door-through
which Rudy and his ilk gained entry.

Today, Congress's January 6th Committee spent a good portion of the
morning asking essentially the same question that Howard Baker, the
ranking Republican on the Senate Watergate Committee, first posed 49
years ago: What did the president know and when did he know it?

In Watergate, getting the answer to Baker's query required the
discovery, the court-ordered release, and the subsequent playing of the
Nixon tapes for Congress, and the American people. During its current
investigation, the January 6th Committee got the answer from a host of
top government officials and Trump campaign leaders, who all testified
that they'd told Donald Trump repeatedly, emphatically, and on
occasion profanely that he'd lost the election to Joe Biden, and that
his protestations that the election had been rigged and subjected to
voter fraud and tampering were nonsense.

Trump's attorney general, Bill Barr, detailed in videotaped testimony
that all the allegations he'd had U.S. attorneys and the FBI
investigate had turned up no evidence of rigging, fraud, or miscounting.
Trump's campaign manager Bill Stepien testified, again on video, that
he'd told Trump many times before the election that the mail vote,
which likely would favor the Democrats, would come in late, and that
this was normal procedure, not evidence of tampering or theft. He
testified that he'd told Trump many times after the election that
he'd lost. The chief attorneys for Trump's campaign testified that
they'd told Trump he'd lost. Jeffrey Rosen, who succeeded Bill Barr
for a brief stint as attorney general, told Trump that he'd lost.
Trump's appointee as U.S. attorney for Northern Georgia (which
includes Atlanta) testified that he'd investigated a video that Rudy
Giuliani said showed Atlanta vote-counters taking ballots from a
mysterious suitcase, though the video clearly showed that the suitcase
was actually an official ballot box.

The Republican Party's longtime chief election attorney, Ben Ginsberg,
who'd represented George W. Bush in

**Bush v. Gore**, testified that none of the cases that Trump's legal
team (that is, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and the deranged crew that
Trump hired after he'd fired his campaign team for telling him the
truth) brought before 62 courts had any credible evidence to back them
up, which is why the judges dismissed half of them at the outset, and
the other half upon examination of the unsubstantiated "evidence" on
which they were based. As Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), the committee member
who skillfully handled the questioning today, then noted, 22 of the
judges before whom those cases were brought were appointed by Republican
presidents; ten were appointed by Trump himself.

Lofgren quoted the opinion of one of those judges, who characterized
these suits as "a coup in search of a legal theory."

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Interspersed with witness testimony, the committee showed footage of
Trump debunking the election in the periods immediately following the
meetings at which he'd been told he hadn't won. (It also showed
footage from months

**before** the election in which Trump had told followers that the only
way he'd lose would be through voter fraud.) On election night,
Stepien testified that he'd told Trump he should say that the count
was ongoing, and everyone should wait until it was done. Instead, he
noted, an obviously drunk Rudy Giuliani urged Trump to claim victory,
and, of course, that's just what Trump did. It also became clear from
Stepien's and others' testimony that they'd tried to keep Rudy
from the vicinity of Trump's ear-and failed.

On the one hand, today's revelations were devastating to Trump and his
wholly fictitious account of the 2020 election results. On the other
hand, Trump's entry to the national political scene came when he
alleged that Barack Obama had actually been born in Kenya, despite all
evidence to the contrary. He was next seen alleging that thousands of
New Jersey Muslims had celebrated the 9/11 attacks, when, again, there
was no shred of evidence behind his claim. When has Trump

**not**been detached from reality, save when he can spin reality to his
advantage?

The Big Lie is the product of one man's narcissistic psychosis. The
deeper question is why it has afflicted the majority of House
Republicans who voted to overturn the electoral vote certifications on
January 6th? How did Trump's narcissistic psychosis come to afflict
them, even though most of them had relied on legal authorities like Barr
and campaign managers like Stepien throughout their careers, and are
likely to do so in the future? How did it come to afflict senators like
Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, who now and then succumb to empiricism? As
with Trump, is there anything that these Republicans can be relied upon
to tell the truth about?

Trump has built his entire career on deception, but despite his
demagogic skills, even he has needed an echo chamber for those lies to
be fully propagated. For that, he's been reliant on right-wing media,
most particularly the Murdoch empire, which by now could teach Joseph
Goebbels a thing or two about how to spread the Big Lie.

Today's witnesses related Trump's various responses to their
truth-telling, which ran the gamut from rage to monologues to a
whack-a-mole mode in which he acknowledged that one far-fetched
allegation might be wrong, only to offer multiple others. Eventually,
though, the price of truth-telling was invariably the same: Either Trump
fired you, or you beat him to the punch by resigning.

Donald doesn't kill the messenger, he just cans them. Though, as one
Republican election commissioner from Philadelphia testified today,
Donald's followers have certainly threatened to kill truth-tellers and
their families.

As the January 6th hearings roll on, one clear difference between Trump
and Nixon is emerging. "What did the president know and when did he know
it?" was a key question about Watergate. With Trump, however, his

**knowledge**of truth has always been subordinated to his

**indifference**to truth.

Not that there isn't some precedent for that, courtesy of the Gospel
of John as set down by Francis Bacon: "'What is truth?' said jesting
Pilate, and would not stay for an answer."

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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