Donald Trump's lies are extensions of his delusional ideation and disqualifies him for running in 2024! #DumpTrump

Growing Old Party needs a younger and saner candidate!

Maine Writer opinion- It's not too late to #DumpTrump❗ But who will pay all his legal bills if he is fired as the 2024 Republican presidential candidate?  Surely, no sane person wants to spend campaign money to pay off Trump's dozens of lawyers.  JD Vance was a Marine Corporal and has zero leadership experience.  Elon Musk was not born in the United States. So, what sane person could take Trump's place? GOP Help Wanted!  Looking for any sane person.

Echo opinion by Scot Lehigh published in the Boston Globe:

Donald Trump is either trying to dupe voters with lies or he is seriously delusional. Either way, Americans of all political stripes should be concerned.

To paraphrase the old saying, who are you going to believe when it comes to crowd size, Donald Trump’s lies or your own eyes 👀?

On Sunday, Trump accused Vice President Kamala Harris of using artificial intelligence to create images of “fake crowds” at her events. Meanwhile, in a complaint-laden press conference at Mar-a-Lago last week, the former president claimed that his speech at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, drew a larger crowd than Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic 1963 speech delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

“She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE,” he wrote on Truth Social.

Reality check. Harris’s crowds haven’t been conjured from AI whole cloth or artificially enhanced. As for Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, it drew about 250,000 listeners, while Trump’s I-have-a-scheme address topped out at an estimated 53,000.

We’ve become so accustomed to Trump’s harebrained assertions that they no longer draw the attention they once did. But with the newly reshaped presidential campaign in its last three months, they should. Here’s why. Trump's endless stream of false claims frame this choice: Trump is either too delusional to comprehend basic reality or he is purposefully and repeatedly lying to voters.

If Trump's false claims were just an occasional thing, one could dismiss them as a slip of the tongue or a mistaken understanding.

But the freshet of falsity that flows from Trump is so continuous that it can’t be explained that way. In his 64-minute rambling Mar-a-Lago press conference, Trump made 162 assertions that a National Public Radio fact-check deemed “misstatements, exaggerations, and outright lies.” The New York Times examined more than a dozen of them. (According to the tally by The Washington Post’s fact-checker, during his four years in office, Trump offered up 30,573 untruths.)

Trump's certainly sound and read like calculated efforts to deceive. Trump, for example, said that the strategic petroleum reserve is “virtually empty,” when it currently contains some 375 million barrels, more than half its all-time high of about 726.6 million barrels. Here, “virtually” is obviously intended to expand the latitude allowed to an off-base assertion before it is labeled a lie.

Trump also claimed that some Democratic states allow infanticide, saying that “Democrats are really the radical ones on [abortion] because they’re allowed to do abortion on the eighth and ninth month and even after birth.”

Actually, infanticide is illegal in every state. Trump’s distortion is an apparent reference to the small number of cases — about 11 a year — when a nonviable fetus or one suffering from severe abnormalities is born during an attempted abortion and doctors employ palliative care rather than intervening to extend the life of the stricken newborn.

There, it’s also illuminating to note that the vast majority of abortions in America, 81 percent, occur in the first nine weeks of a pregnancy, with 93 percent taking place during the first trimester. Only 1 percent came at 21 weeks or later, and then principally because of serious risk to the health of the mother or severe fetal abnormalities.

Without citing any credible evidence, Trump also maintained that a mysterious “they” are trying to sign up illegal immigrants to vote, saying, “Lately, I’ve seen where they’re trying to sign these people up to vote. … They cannot let illegal immigrants vote in this upcoming election.”

This seems to be a reference to a now widely debunked post that made the rounds on X in the spring. As fact-checkers have noted numerous times, it is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. 

Instances of that sort of attempted voting fraud are very rare. It is, however, a falsehood Trump has offered up before. After the 2016, election, he claimed that Hillary Clinton only won the popular vote because millions of illegal immigrants voted. A commission Trump established to investigate the matter found no evidence to support his allegations of widespread voter fraud. Trump obviously knows that.

The prevalent assumption among commentators has long been that Trump lies to create a sense of shared resentment with his indifferently informed and lesser-educated white male base and keep them enthused about and contributing to his campaign. 

Others suggest he is laying the groundwork for denying another election loss, though after his claim of a stolen 2020, election was revealed as an utter lie, one would have to lean into duncehood to get fooled again on that score.

Now, certain conservative media outlets ignore Trump’s profusion of false statements, sparing Trump supporters without other sources of information the cognitive dissonance of dealing with his serial dishonestly.

No one, of course, wants to believe they are being played for a dupe by someone they view as their champion. But to avoid that conclusion, those who are aware of Trump’s serial dishonesty must confront the only other plausible alternative: He is so deeply delusional that he can’t distinguish between fact and fiction, reality and nonsense.

It hardly needs to be said that someone who suffers from that failing doesn’t belong anywhere near the Oval Office. 

IOW #PsychoTrump❗  #DumpTrump

Media Alert! Donald Trump must be held accountable for spewing lies and misinformation!

A Mississippi point of view by the Association Press and published in Mississippi Free Press  (Check my blog published on April, 1, 2017....a preamble to continuous lies... https://oneturkeyrun.blogspot.com/2017/04/lie-library-solicitions-trump-legacy.html)

In his first news conference since Vice President Kamala Harris became popular the Democratic nominee for president, former President Donald Trump said he would debate her on September 10, and pushed for two more debates. The Republican presidential nominee (X-president) spoke for more than an hour, discussing a number of issues facing the country and then taking questions from reporters. He made a number of false and misleading claims. 

Many of them have been made before. Here’s a look at some of Trump's false claims. 

1.  Crowd Sizes:  CLAIM: “The biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken — I’ve spoken to the biggest crowds. Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me. If you look at Martin Luther King when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people, if not we had more. And they said he had a million people, but I had 25,000 people.”

“Stop questioning the size of her crowds,” was the advice former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. said in a Fox News appearance.

But, THE FACTS: Trump was comparing the crowd at his speech in front of the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, to the crowd that attended Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech on August. 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial.  But far more people are estimated to have been at Dr. Martin Luther King's speech, than the former.

Approximately 250,000 people attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, at which King gave his speech, according to the National Park Service. The Associated Press reported in 2021, that there were at least 10,000 people at Trump’s address.

Moreover, Trump and King did not speak in the same location. King spoke from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, which looks east toward the Washington Monument. Trump spoke at the Ellipse, a grassy area just south of the White House.

2,  January 6th: CLAIM: “Nobody was killed on January 6th.” ❓

But, THE FACTS: That’s false❗ In fact, 😡 five people died in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and its immediate aftermath. Pro-Trump rioters breached the U.S. Capitol that day amid Congress’ effort to certify Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.

Among the deceased are Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter shot and killed by police, and Brian Sicknick, a police officer who died the day after battling the mob. Four additional officers who responded to the riot killed themselves in the following weeks and months. 

Babbitt, was a 35-year-old Air Force veteran from San Diego, was shot and killed by a police officer as she climbed through a broken part of a Capitol door during the violent riot. Trump often cited Babbitt’s death while lamenting the treatment of those who attended a rally outside the White House that day and then marched to the Capitol, many of whom fought with police.

3.  Democratic Nomination: CLAIM: “The presidency was taken away from Joe Biden, and I’m no Biden fan, but I tell you what, from a constitutional standpoint, from any standpoint you look at, they took the presidency away.”

But, THE FACTS: There is nothing in the Constitution that prevents the Democratic Party from making Vice President Kamala Harris its nominee. That process is determined by the Democratic National Committee.

Harris officially claimed the nomination Monday following a five-day online voting process, receiving 4,563 delegate votes out of 4,615 cast, or about 99% of participating delegates. A total of 52 delegates in 18 states cast their votes for “present,” the only other option on the ballot.

The vice president was the only candidate eligible to receive votes after no other candidate qualified by the party’s deadline following President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the race on July 21.
The Economy

4.  CLAIM: Suggesting things would be different if he had been in office rather than Biden: “You wouldn’t have had inflation. ❓ You wouldn’t have had any inflation because inflation was caused by their bad energy problems❓ Now they’ve gone back to the Trump thing because they need the votes. They’re drilling now because they had to go back because gasoline was going up to 7, 8, 9 dollars a barrel.”

But, THE FACTS: There would have been at least some inflation if Trump had been reelected in 2020, because many of the factors causing inflation were outside a president’s control. Prices spiked in 2021 after cooped-up Americans ramped up their spending on goods such as exercise bikes and home office furniture, overwhelming disrupted supply chains. U.S. auto companies, for example, couldn’t get enough semiconductors and had to sharply reduce production, causing new and used car prices to shoot higher. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in March 2022, also sent gas and food prices soaring around the world, as Ukraine’s wheat exports were disrupted and many nations boycotted Russian oil and gas.

Still, under Biden, U.S. oil production reached a worldwide record level earlier this year.

Many economists, including some Democrats, say Biden’s $1.9 trillion financial support package, approved in March 2021, which provided a $1,400 stimulus check to most Americans, helped fuel inflation by ramping up demand. 

But, the relief check didn’t cause inflation all by itself. And Trump supported $2,000 stimulus checks in December 2020, rather than the $600 checks included in a package he signed into law in December 2020.

Prices still spiked in countries with different policies than Biden’s, such as France, Germany and the U.K., though mostly because of the sharp increase in energy costs stemming from Russia’s invasion.
Immigration

5. CLAIM: “Twenty million people came over the border during the Biden-Harris administration — 20 million people — and it could be very much higher than that. Nobody really knows.”

But, THE FACTS: Trump’s 20 million figure is unsubstantiated at best, and he didn’t provide sources.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports 7.1 million arrests for illegal crossings from Mexico from January 2021 through June 2024. That’s arrests, not people. Under pandemic-era asylum restrictions, many people crossed more than once until they succeeded because there were no legal consequences for getting turned back to Mexico. So the number of people is lower than the number of arrests.

In addition, CBP- i.e., Customs, says it stopped migrants 1.1 million times at official land crossings with Mexico from January 2021 through June 2024, largely under an online appointment system to claim asylum called CBP One.

U.S. authorities also admitted nearly 500,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela under presidential authority if they had financial sponsors and arrived at an airport.

All told, that’s nearly 8.7 million encounters. Again, the number of people is lower due to multiple encounters for some.

There are an unknown number of people who eluded capture, known as “got-aways” in Border Patrol parlance. The Border Patrol estimates how many but doesn’t publish that number.

6.  CLAIM: Vice President Kamala Harris “was the border czar 100% and all of a sudden for the last few weeks she’s not the border czar anymore.”

But, THE FACTS: Harris was appointed to address “root causes” of migration in Central America. That migration manifests itself in illegal crossings to the U.S., but she was not assigned to the border.
New York Cases

7.  CLAIM: “The New York cases are totally controlled out of the Department of Justice.”

But, THE FACTS: Trump was referring to two cases brought against him in New York — one civil and the other criminal.

Neither has anything to do with the U.S. Department of Justice.

The civil case was initiated by a lawsuit from New York Attorney General Letitia James. In that case, Trump was ordered in February to pay a $454 million penalty for lying about his wealth for years as he built the real estate empire that vaulted him to stardom and the White House.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a state-level prosecutor, brought the criminal case. In May, a jury found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016, election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex.

Associated Press writers Melissa Goldin and Elliot Spagat and economics writer Christopher Rugaber contributed to this article.

Find more AP Fact Checks here.

50 Years and America Needs a "Dream Speech" Just as Much Today

Listening to the replays of Dr Martin Luther King resonating "I Have a Dream" stirs emotions, memories and, sadly, feelings of inadequacy.  

"I Have a Dream", is a memorable Civil Rights clarion call to the nation, delivered a half century ago and celebrated in Washington DC this week. 

Dr. Martin Luther King 1929-1968

Have we really helped to achieve Dr. Martin Luther King's dream of equality for all?  Sadly, no; but we have made some progress.
Just some progress.  Although the ugly stigmas of segregation are largely eliminated, Blacks continue to feel isolated.  Just replay videos of the Hurricane Katrina evacuations in New Orleans to see how our nation's ghettos were hidden in plain sight, until they were forced into America's consciousness by a devastating natural disaster.

Maybe one reason Americans and, indeed, the world, are still captivated by Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech is because we realize how we still need to hear it.

Dr. King's electric effectiveness in 1963 blended masterful speech inflections, speaking as though delivering an operatic soliloquy, coupled with a brilliant passion for freedom and complimented  by his charisma. 

In retrospect, the speech might even be better and more meaningful today then when King delivered it, at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, addressing thousands in the awed audience.

These are excerpts from what Dr. King said on August 28, 1963:

"I am happy to join with you today in what will go down
in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in
the history of our nation."

"Five score years ago a great American in whose symbolic shadow 

we stand today signed the Emancipation Proclamation."

"This momentous decree is a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity."

"But 100 years later the Negro still is not free." 

"One hundred years later the life of the Negro is still badly
crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of
discrimination. One hundred years later the Negro lives
on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast
ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later the
Negro is still in exile in his own land. So we've come here today
to dramatize a shameful condition."

"In a sense we have come to our Nation's Capital to cash a check. When the architects of our great republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed to the inalienable rights of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

"It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given its colored people a bad check, a check that has come back marked 'insufficient funds'."

The excerpts demonstrate Dr. King's eloquence in articulating his vision for equality; but his poignant words also emphasize how inadequate Americans have been in responding to Dr. King's inspired vision.  Unbelievably, American voting rights are still being debated especially since our US Supreme Court recently decided our nation has moved beyond the racial issues that drove the urgency for the Voting Rights Act, signed in 1965.   This landmark piece of national legislation in the United States prohibits discrimination in voting.  But the US Supreme Court recently decided things aren't really so bad, after all.  Oh really? Our US Supreme Court justices must live in a racial utopia.  Voting rights are being seriously challenged today because Republicans want to do all they can to discourage people of color from achieving equal voting rights, because they want to control their ability to register and vote for Democratic candidates. Dr. King's dream was to see our Democracy succeed.  His struggle was for racial equality rather than for political advantage.  

It's sincerely disappointing to see voting rights morph into a political power struggle, especially, as Dr. King said, when our Founding Fathers created our nation to be a Democracy - with liberty and justice for all.   

On the anniversary of August 28th speech, the charismatic leader who will take the podium for the late Dr. Martin Luther King will be President of the United States Barack Obama. Yes, Dr. King's vision will be realized in the person of our nation's first African-American president.  Incredulously, however, many right wing zealous Americans have not accepted the legitimacy of our democratically elected President, demonstrating how our progress has been extraordinary, but ineffective.

Hopefully, President Obama will deliver an impassioned sequel to the famous "I Have a Dream" speech, when he commemorates the 50th anniversary on August 28, 2013.  As President, he'll embody Dr. King's dream.  Americans need to be reminded that Dr. King's vision for America has advanced, but we need to be inspired, again, about the dream.

"This is not time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism."

"Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy."

"Now it the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice."

"Now it the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood."

To end, now is the time for President Obama to reignite the dream.