Springfield Ohio is a tragically sad example of how an evil lie travels around the world "before truth gets its boots on"

Echo opinion with chilling imagry published in the Albany Herald, a Georgia newspaper, by Gene Lyons:

The formal term for what the *Trump Cult* has visited upon the Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, is "blood libel." 

Trump campaign's newest evil nonsense constitutes a blood libel

Although foreigners and outsiders have doubtless been blamed for everything from droughts and floods to outbreaks of disease throughout human history, conspiracists have traditionally blamed Jews.

Historians generally trace the *evil👿👺💀* term to the year 1144 in Norwich, England, when the corpse of a 12-year-old child was found. As part of a campaign to establish the dead boy as a martyr and the church where he was buried as a (profitable) pilgrimage site, an enterprising monk wrote a series of tracts blaming local Jews for his ritual murder.

And so it has gone for centuries: a totally imaginary slander kept alive by bigots and crackpots from Russia to Southern California.

"You are not forgotten, Simon of Trent," wrote a gunman who shot up a synagogue near San Diego in 2019, referencing a slain toddler allegedly martyred in 1475.  Medievil horror❗

🏰🗡️⚔️⚔🐴🗡🛡⚜🏹👑🐲🤺🛡️💢👹

"The horror that you and countless children have endured at the hands of the Jews will never be forgiven."

Events in Ohio demonstrate that anti-Semitism is far from the only form of racist scapegoating in America today. 

The Trump Cult has gone downright medieval on undocumented immigrants. Donald Trump himself calls them "vermin" 🐍who are "poisoning the blood" of (white) Americans. 

During his catastrophically bad debate with Kamala Harris, the former president charged Haitian immigrants in Springfield with unspeakable crimes.

"In Springfield, they are eating the dogs," Trump said as the split screen broadcast showed Harris looking on incredulously. "They're eating the cats," Trump continued, repeating an internet conspiracy theory that local police call totally unsubstantiated. They attribute the rumors to a Facebook post citing its source as a "neighbor's daughter's friend."

The author has herself admitted that she has no idea if it's true, and regrets posting it online.

Challenged by debate moderator David Muir, Trump doubled down. "But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there."

Would it shock you to learn that no such firsthand accounts exist? Not even on Fox  (Fake❗)News, presumably because nobody in Ohio can be found who's willing to endorse so crazy a story even for the sake of the orange messiah. It would turn their lives upside down.

For most Americans, kidnapping and cooking a family pet would be a more shocking crime than, well, pretty much anything I can imagine. That's what makes it a blood libel: a false accusation that seeks to render its targets subhuman. Beneath contempt.

It follows that anybody who would endorse it deserves nothing but scorn. For all the predictable whining of his supporters about how terribly unfair it was of ABC moderators to correct this grotesque lie, the simple truth is that Trump hurt himself.

"You stupid mf'ers just got Trump to repeat your lie about the pets," right-wing talk radio host Erick Erickson wrote on X. "Congrats on setting the news stories tomorrow by lying so Trump picks it up."

Yeah, well, nobody made him do it. The combination of Trump's own ignorance, credulousness and bigotry caused him serious political harm.

So, it's only fitting that the worst vice presidential candidate in recent American history, J.D. Vance, not only  doubled down on the libel, but went on national TV and bragged about it❗

Seriously, what is wrong with J.D. Vance? The reason he endorsed the anti-Haitian scare stories, he said, wasn't that they are true, he admitted to CNN's Dana Bash, but to correct news media bias.

"If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people," Vance said, "then that's what I'm going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast."

Incredulously, the normally unflappable Bash emphasized that Vance had just admitted the whole pet-eating business was a 🤥 made-up story. (IOW- lies❗)

The candidate - Marine Corporal Vance.... didn't deny it.

"I say that we're creating a story, meaning we're creating the American media focusing on it," he insisted.

Meanwhile, the kinds of MAGA cranks who appear to see Trump as semi-divine and incapable of error sprang into action. The small city of Springfield was besieged by bomb threats and warnings of impending violence that led to school, hospital and university closings. Predictions of mayhem caused panic among the Haitian community.

They are legal immigrants actively recruited to the community to fill factory jobs that had gone begging, as local authorities, business leaders and Ohio's Republican Gov. Mike DeWine emphasized. 

It's all nonsense, a classic blood libel blaming the Haitians for the panic some benighted Ohioans feel at their black faces and Creole-accented voices. To Trumpers, poor deluded fools, that makes them frightening and evil.

Arkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000).

Donald Trump is on another political planet - his right wing crystal ball needs a power washing

An opiniono echo by Gene Lyons*, published in the Muskogee Phoenix, in Oklahoma

WASHINGTON — In a storm of national challenges, perhaps the most urgent one is this: Donald Trump exists in a different country from the rest of us.

Donald Trump is in a land where the novel coronavirus is harmless. Where hydroxychloroquine is still a miracle drug. Where President Donald Trump’s handling of the pandemic is an example to the world. It is a land where Black Lives Matter is a movement of looting and violent subversion. Where the Confederacy is part of “our heritage.” Where police brutality is the desired norm. It is a land where every bad poll is a political plot, and the “silent majority” will always ride to Trump’s rescue.

Trump is not only using this right-wing information bubble to exploit his supporters. A genie hidden in the Kremlin helped him in 2016, but access to that evil mystic has been exposed and the crystal ball is  clouded, in need of a power washing.  

He seems, increasingly, to have taken up residence there. As his failures have multiplied, his hold on political reality has loosened. Trump has become our “boy in the bubble,” with an intellectual immune system too weak for him to survive exposure to reality.

In one sense, every Donald Trump struggles with this temptation. 

All of his predecessors have lived in cocoons with high security, familiar advisers and deference. How can you really be wrong when Hail to the Chief is played whenever you walk in the room? 

In most presidencies, this tendency is fought. Working with allies in the National Security Council and the State Department, I helped introduce President George W. Bush to a series of dissidents and human rights activists from Sudan, North Korea, China and elsewhere. Their stories touched Bush and focused his policy making. At the White House, I sent Bush articles harshly critical of his foreign policy - which sometimes angered him, but generally provoked discussion. This did not guarantee good results, but it enabled serious deliberation.

Trump has systematically removed sources of dissent and critical thinking within his administration - people like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats. Sycophants now occupy those posts. From the start, the president expressed distrust for American intelligence services - even publicly preferring Vladimir Putin’s word over their findings. Trump has recently disputed the views of government public health experts and tried to shift and sabotage their professional advice.

For Trump, everything is politics, and all politics is personal. Disagreement with his impulses is taken as betrayal. Dissent is disloyalty.

So what are the sources of truth and authority in the land of Trump? There is the cool rationality of right-wing Twitter. There is the wisdom of golfing buddies. There is a constant consumption and regurgitation of cable television. There is Tucker Carlson for advice on epidemiology, Jeanine Pirro on constitutional theory, Lou Dobbs on immigration policy, Sean Hannity to polish his shoes.

We have entered a genuine crisis of truth. The President of the United States is only allowing inputs that reinforce his instincts. He is operating based on a set of views and assumptions that have no relation to the actual lives of Americans. The African American experience of injustice doesn’t matter to him. The deaths of the elderly from a preventable disease don’t register. The struggles of Americans in a disease-cursed economy are not even admitted. Instead, we get a huge helping of denial with a side of racism.

Does Trump really think this is the path to reelection? Does he believe that most Americans will give him a pat on the back for a job well done? Yes, he appears to believe this. It is part of his delusion to believe it is always November of 2016. Hillary Clinton is still his opponent. The polls are still weighted against him. The experts and doubters will again be humiliated. If only he stays the course of polarization and intolerance. If only he refuses to doubt his bigotry and his destiny.

But Trump is not the strongman of his daydreams. In the real world of COVID-19, racial injustice and economic suffering, his delusions are pathetic and dangerous. He combines the pretentions of a Caesar with the impulse control of a toddler. He is bound by his own compulsions and imprisoned by his own lies. The scent of his weakness is everywhere.

Because Trump cannot listen, he will not change. And it is no longer 2016.

*Gene Lyons is an American political columnist who has defended former U.S. President Bill Clinton. He is not to be confused with actor Gene Lyons (actor), or with conservative journalist Eugene Lyons.

#fakeBarrLetter - does not exonerate Donald Trump

Donald Trump lies about his golf game and can't even admit to his height and weight. 

"They didn’t report any of those multiple offers by a hostile foreign power to the FBI."

Gene Lyons opinion echo published in the Biddeford Maine Journal Tribune:

So Trump says the Mueller report proves his innocence: “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION.”

As usual, he’s making it up.

Nobody outside the Justice Department has seen the Mueller report yet. But even Attorney General William Barr’s four-page summary of the evidence regarding obstruction of justice specifically quotes its author: “(W)hile this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

The word “collusion” appears nowhere in Barr’s summary. He does write that “the Special Counsel did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.”

Here’s something else they didn’t do: They didn’t report any of those multiple offers by a hostile foreign power to the FBI. That in itself constitutes a profound betrayal. Indeed, history records that Trump himself vociferously and repeatedly denied what U.S. intelligence agencies said was definitive evidence of Russian skullduggery. “It could be Russia … It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” the candidate claimed during one presidential debate. Trump’s strange obsequiousness toward Vladimir Putin continues to this day.

Trump's campaign knew all about Russian hacks of DNC emails; that much has been proven beyond a doubt. (Russia if you're listening!) At minimum, they sat on their hands. Reading between the lines of Barr’s summary, it’s clear that the Mueller report endorses the central finding of the intelligence community: The Russians actively worked to help Trump win the 2016 election. We should be asking ourselves why.

What did Russia hope to gain?

Conspiracy, of course, is a notoriously difficult crime to prove. It becomes almost impossible when one party to a corrupt bargain is beyond the law: that is, resides in Russia and isn’t being made available to investigators.

Which is not to say that a cunning rogue like Donald Trump was ever going to enter into a quid pro quo arrangement with the Russian government and leave fingerprints. It was always naive to think that he might. The president famously doesn’t write things down. These things are done with winks and nudges. What’s said and what’s not said.

A Kremlin intermediary offers “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Donald Jr. is dumb enough to write, “I love it,” and to take a meeting — the famous June 2016 session at Trump Tower with Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya — but Donald Sr. remains offstage. In the building, but not at the meeting.

What’s more, Veselnitskaya isn’t technically a member of the Russian government. Neither, however, has she visited the United States since her name first surfaced in The New York Times. Sure, the president helped Junior concoct a fake cover story, but it has never been a crime to lie to the press.

This too: Insufficient evidence to prove a criminal conspiracy isn’t the same as no evidence. As shrewdly as Attorney General Barr has played his hand so far, that’s worth keeping in mind. We’ll find out how Trump triumphalism looks after people have read the actual report, although the necessity of reading and thinking about a complex document with Sean Hannity screaming in our collective ears will certainly limit the Mueller report’s impact.

It’s also worth remembering that there are all sorts of dishonorable actions that aren’t crimes. For example, it’s not a crime for a man to have an affair with his sister-in-law, but it’s contemptible all the same. As Michael Kinsley once quipped, “The scandal isn’t what’s illegal; the scandal is what’s legal.”

I agree with The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer that the single most unsettling revelation of the entire investigation is the one that fixer Michael Cohen is going to prison for lying to Congress about: Trump Tower Moscow.

Trump himself repeatedly and shamelessly lied about the project throughout the presidential campaign, praising Vladimir Putin at every turn, and falsely claiming to have no business dealings whatsoever in Russia while standing to profit by hundreds of millions had it gone through.

But once again, Trump didn’t do it under oath, and it’s not a crime to lie to American voters. Even if by so doing he exposed himself to potential Russian blackmail. Had Trump not behaved himself, Putin could have pulled the plug on his presidential campaign in a heartbeat. Trump behaved.

Franklin Foer: “Trump’s motive for praising Putin appears to have been, in large part, commercial. With his relentless pursuit of Trump Tower Moscow, the Republican nominee for president had active commercial interests in Russia that he failed to disclose to the American people. … Trump ran his campaign as something of an infomercial, hoping to convince the Russians that he was a good partner. To enrich himself, Trump promised to realign American foreign policy.”

“Total EXONERATION,” the man says.

I don’t think so.

— Arkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner.