Donald Trump has created a legacy of deliberate lies

Echo opinion published in the Las Vegas Sun newspaper

What Trump is teaching our children - (not!)
By Charles Blow

When our children are young, we work doggedly to foster in them a deep and abiding sense of morality, ethics and character.

We try to teach them to always tell the truth, to be kind and generous, to be brave enough to do the right thing even if others aren’t as brave.

We try to teach them empathy and compassion, that caring about the less fortunate betters society and is also self-edifying.

We teach them to be gracious and thankful and not to brag or bully. Also, don’t lie, cheat or steal.

We teach them to have self-respect and to respect others. We teach them that everyone is equally worthy and valuable, no matter who they are, what they look like, how much or little they have or to which God they pray, if they pray at all.

We do all this as our children are coming to know how honor and integrity are constructed, maintained and defended. We want to raise good people and good citizens, people who respect society and follow the rules, though not blindly. We want them to question the world, and if they identify injustice, work to eliminate it.

We as parents are the first teachers, the most important ones, but there are many tangential teachers, as well — like, at family gatherings, at schools, at places of worship, on playgrounds, and also in literature, on television and on social media.

The president of the United States is one of those teachers. I don’t think many children follow a president or the politics around that presidency on a routine basis, but the sense of the president sinks in.

They know that the president should be one of the best of us, not the worst. When children do well, adults often say, “You could be president someday.” The presidents who children are taught to venerate are those who are judged to have been honorable men who changed the country for the better.

This is, on some level, hagiography (aka, adoration writing)— but, just scratch the surface and the flaws are revealed 

But there is also value in the lessons to be learned, even when flaws are revealed.

Nevertheless, seriously and harmfully, Donald Trump is exploding all of that. He is everything we teach our children not to be. In Trump’s world of immorality, the lessons being taught undo all the principles parents struggle to instill.

• He is teaching our children that there is no absolute truth; there is “alternative fact.” It’s not what you say but how you say it and how vociferously you can defend it.
• He is teaching little boys that women’s bodies exist as playgrounds for privileged men and that there is no price to be paid if you are popular enough or rich enough.
• He is teaching little girls that if they are ever victims of sexual assault by a popular, wealthy boy and deign to reveal it, they will likely come under withering verbal assault.
• He is teaching our children that the color of one’s skin does indeed supersede the content of one’s character. He is teaching them that there is a skin-color hierarchy in which whiteness is perched on top.
• He is teaching black and brown children that their citizenship and connection to this country is tenuous and fractional, not like white children.
• He is teaching them that it is perfectly normal to separate some children from their parents, put them in cages and argue that they don’t need soap or toothbrushes, or to have the lights turned off so they can sleep.
• He is teaching them to never acknowledge an error, that apologies are for suckers, that what’s right is whatever you say it is.

And, here’s the thing: The children growing up in enormous portions of American households accept, defend and even applaud Trump’s behavior. What lessons are those children absorbing? What behaviors will be modeled on Trump’s example?
My own children came of age in their political awareness under President Barack Obama. I didn’t always agree with his policy, but he was an honorable man whom I could point to as an honorable example.

What do Trump’s supporters tell their children about his incessant lying, the multiple accusations that he either was sexually inappropriate with women, assaulted them or even raped them?

How do they explain Trump’s racism to these children?

The example Trump is setting will outlast him. In the same way that Obama’s example helped reinforce for my children that anything is possible with hard work and perseverance, I fear today’s children are being taught that there are no rules for he who wins.

The next generation of politicians, doctors and lawyers are watching us all right now, and they are watching him. 

And Trump is teaching them that you can be the worst version of yourself, rise to the most powerful position in the world and scare people into not holding you accountable. (ugh!) Congratulations, America.

Charles Blow is a columnist for The New York Times.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims/?utm_term=.74fdb5b4a3e4

Nevada opinion editorial - Donald Trump is not normal

"We are not dealing with a normal person here, let alone a normal president." ~ Charles Blow (echo letter published in the Las Vegas Sun newspaper)

Nation’s constitutional crisis to hold Donald Trump accountable for "Russia gate",  is moving in slow motion

 George Papadopoulos~ has pleaded guillty

Donald Trump will destroy this entire country — its institutions and its safeguards, the rule of law and the customs of civility, the concept of truth and the inviolable nature of valor — to protect his own skin.

We are not dealing with a normal person here, let alone a normal president.

This is a damaged man, a man who has always lived in his own reality and played by his own rules. 

When the truth didn’t suit him, he simply, with a devilish ease, invented an alternate reality. There were no hard and fast absolutes in his realm of rubber. Everything was malleable, and he had an abundance of gall and a deficit of integrity to push everything until it bent.

Also, he didn’t start his run for president believing that he could actually win, or even wanting to win. 

Rather, Trump saw his campaign as just another show, another act in the carnival. He came slowly, I believe, to the realization that he could win, and more important, that he wanted to.

But again, Trump didn’t want to win to serve the country; he wanted to win to serve his ego. He wanted to win simply because he hates losing, and to come close and lose was far more injurious than to be able to say early on that a party of traditionalists simply wasn’t avant-garde enough for the radical change he represented.

In the process of turning a vanity campaign into a valid campaign, he had to hurry up and ramp up, and he had to take on some of the only people willing to ally themselves with such a ridiculous, tarnished, vile, scandalous, unscrupulous person. The people he got for his team share many of those same characteristics.

The president won the election, with Russian assistance and against all odds. The win shocked the world, including Trump himself. He hadn’t had to alter his most negative traits; he won with them on full display.

He was working-class white America’s rebuff to an erudite black man and a supremely experienced woman. Trump’s defects had been validated. He was loved among those who hate.

But Trump had no clue that his greatest victory could open him to his greatest jeopardy. For him, it is a stinging irony that his lifetime high could lay him low.

He is incensed by the threat and is shifting every lever of power to thwart it. His own survival, and that of his family and empire, is all that matters. For him, this is the ultimate game of Machismo Monopoly: The properties are at stake and there’s a “Go To Jail” square in Robert Mueller’s corner.

Another part of all of this that must sting is that much of this legal mess springs from Trump’s own recklessness and impetuousness.

The people he surrounded himself with were shady characters, just like him. For instance, Carter Page is the most weaselly of creatures. And yet the president was touting him as one of his foreign policy advisers.

The dud of a memo by the near-treasonous water boy Devin Nunes was mostly about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court repeatedly granting the FBI permission to monitor Page’s contacts with Russians. Far from tarnishing the investigation into Russian contacts with the Trump campaign, the memo seemed to bolster the credibility of that investigation.

The investigation was not exclusively born of the Christopher Steele dossier, as Trump and his lackeys insisted. The memo says this about Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos: 

“The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016 by FBI agent Pete Strzok.”

Papadopoulos has since pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and is cooperating with the special counsel.

Worse than firing a blank, Trump’s broadside on the FBI and the Department of Justice with this memo may well have backfired.

The tantalizing possibility that this memo would contain actual, accurate damning evidence that the investigation was corrupt just vanished. The contents of that memo are as thin as Trump’s coif.

His attempts to smear the truth seekers with lies are failing. Sure, some die-hards — millions of them actually — will continue to believe, but the truth is a funny thing: It will not forever be hidden. Everything eventually finds its way to the light.

But take no solace in that, folks. The closer Mueller gets to the full truth, the more Trump’s panic will grow. He will feel more and more like a cornered animal, and it is likely that he will resort to his final, unthinkable options.

Firing Mueller is a definite possibility.

People say that would create a constitutional crisis, but we are already trapped in a slow-motion constitutional crisis, or constitutional train wreck.
Trump will never put the country above himself. And his Republican assistants in the legislature have so bought into Trumpism that they now know they will share his fate.

Buckle up, folks: This ride will get much rougher before it finally comes to an end.

Charles Blow is a columnist for The New York Times.