Somebody said
Trump again casually told a random lie about a public official, for no apparent reason apart from floating malice and aggression. The Times put it more politely, as “falsely blames” and “wrongly blamed,” but what they mean is he lied and defamed.
Defending his son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 presidential campaign, President Trump wrongly blamed former Attorney General Loretta Lynch for admitting the lawyer to the United States in the first place.
“Somebody said that her visa or her passport was approved by Attorney General Lynch,” Mr. Trump said Thursday at a joint news conference with President Emmanuel Macron of France. “She was here because of Lynch.”
And that “somebody” was Donald Trump, lying again.
Anderson Cooper was blistering about that “Somebody said” last night, pointing out that if reporters tried to cite “somebody said” as a source they’d be fired. He does that all the time, Trump does – somebody said, everybody says, people are saying, I just learned, I heard, everybody knows – variations on the theme of generic nameless meaningless placeholder where a source should be. That’s ok in conversation when it’s a matter of information whose source you can’t remember, but it’s not at all ok when it’s a matter of claiming Real Person With Name did something illegal or immoral – it’s not at all ok but it’s habitual with Trump. It’s a good signal to the nature of the man, that it comes so easily to him. That right there is a man with no scruples or conscience or sense of decency whatsoever – a psychopath perhaps, but at any rate a selfish immoral shit.
Veselnitskaya entered the US in June 2016 through a visitor’s visa issued by the State Department. Loretta Lynch was not the Secretary of State, she was the Attorney General.
I’m confused. What if Lynch—what if Obama himself!—had admitted this Russian lawyer into the US?
How does that have any bearing at all on what Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner did? This is the dumbest deflection I’ve ever seen.
Sure, I robbed that guy, but you’re the one who invited him to the party, so it’s on you!
All he feels he needs out a deflection is to trigger right-wing anger at the usual targets by mentioning them in a related context. At that point, their brains latch on and just trundle down familiar hate-worn paths.
For the rest of us, it counts – kinda – as a response, if not a meaningful, accurate, appropriate or relevant answer, and the journalists around will often enough let him get away with that. Heck, they’ll be busy enough describing the lie and explaining it like Ophelia here, and (alas) the people listening to his are almost entirely only the people who already know that practically nothing that falls out of that mouth is truthful, thoughtful, or sensical
So there’s only a very narrow slice of the audience who can possibly come away with a significantly reduced opinion of him afterward: the remainder will be cheering him on or tiredly putting just one more piece of evidence of his mendacity on the mountain of similar bits. I think he’s smart enough, in a low-cunning sort of way, to have some awareness of that and he trades on it.
Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian national to receive dirt on Hillary Clinton.
“Oh, yeah? Well, what about Benghazi?”
That’s a good point. What were we talking about, again?
You forgot “But her eeeee-mmmmaaaaaaiiiiiilllllssssssssssssss!”