Donald Trump invented the art of the conspiracy theory. Trump constantly lies it is difficult to determine fact from fiction

 We are all conspiracy theorists now

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe by Renée Graham

A decade of Trump has warped our sense of truth and facts. 

Frankly, that probably won’t end when his presidency does.

First came the gunshots. Then came the conspiracy theories.

Even before a California man who allegedly tried to assassinate Donald Trump at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association gala on Saturday April 25, was identified, social media was boiling over with speculation that what the Justice Department has charged as an attempt on Trump’s life was fake.

Within minutes, the word “staged” quickly trended on various sites.

It was the kind of spontaneous response that one usually expects from those internet corners where tinfoil is the headgear of choice and where denizens still bicker over the legitimacy of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.

But reactions to the shooting weren’t the sole province of the usual “Lone Gunmen” types, who steadfastly believe that the real truth is always lurking out there.

“Has there ever been a president have [sic] this many close ‘attempts’ on their life?” Democratic Representative Jasmine Crockett of Texas posted on Threads. “Maybe it’s lax gun laws, maybe it’s lack of mental health funding, or maybe it’s fake … who knows … ”❓

Despite no evidence, there is a pervasive sense that this alleged third attempt on Trump’s life in less than two years was concocted to draw attention away from the president’s quagmire of a war in Iran; gas prices averaging more than $4 a gallon; the files where he is named in the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein; and the lowest poll numbers in either of Trump’s White House terms.

As usual, Trump did nothing to tamp down the suspicions. It certainly didn’t help that in comments to the media after the rest of the dinner was canceled, he used the shooting to justify restarting construction on that ballroom/bunker that he demolished the East Wing of the White House to build.

Earlier this month, a federal judge allowed construction on the underground bunker to continue for “national security” but halted work on the ballroom, Donald Trump's very unpopular pet project.

“We need the ballroom,” Trump said. He also claimed without proof that the Secret Service and military “are demanding it.” But the only demands came from the MAGA minions on social media, who amplified Trump’s expensive ballroom blitz.

That right-wing offensive only churned even more conspiracies that the alleged assassination attempt was manufactured to promote the necessity of Trump’s 💲400 million ballroom.

This is life when myriad conspiracy theories feed biases and many Americans drift further from the truth. Political polarization has always challenged facts. But no one in recent memory has done more to gut the truth than Trump.

He called the deadly January 6, 2021, insurrection a “day of love” and the white supremacist supporters who pummeled police officers and defiled the US Capitol “patriots.” Trump incited that insurrection after he lied that the 2020, presidential election that he lost to Joe Biden was “rigged” and “stolen” from him.

In 2024, Trump falsely claimed that Biden took performance-enhancing drugs before his better-than-expected State of the Union address. He lied that Kamala Harris, then vice president and the Democratic presidential nominee, used AI-generated images of crowds at her rallies. During a presidential debate, Trump bellowed nonsense about Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio.

While what happened at the WHCA event is still being debated, this is unassailable: In a decade where Trump has sowed mistrust, we have all become conspiracy theorists.

As usual, Trump did nothing to tamp down the suspicions. It certainly didn’t help that in comments to the media after the rest of the dinner was canceled, he used the shooting to justify restarting construction on that ballroom/bunker that he demolished the East Wing of the White House to build.

Earlier this month, a federal judge allowed construction on the underground bunker to continue for “national security” but halted work on the ballroom, Donald Trump's expensive and unpopular pet project.

“We need the ballroom,” Trump said. He also claimed without proof that the Secret Service and military “are demanding it.” But the only demands came from the MAGA minions on social media, who amplified Trump’s ballroom blitz.

That right-wing offensive only churned even more conspiracies that the alleged assassination attempt was manufactured to promote the necessity of Trump’s 💲400 million ballroom.

This is life when myriad conspiracy theories feed biases and many Americans drift further from the truth. Political polarization has always challenged facts. But no one in recent memory has done more to gut the truth than Trump.

Trump called the deadly January 6, 2021, insurrection a “day of love” and the white supremacist supporters who pummeled police officers and defiled the US Capitol “patriots.” Trump incited that insurrection after he lied that the 2020 presidential election that he lost to Joe Biden was “rigged” and “stolen” from him.

In 2024, Trump falsely claimed that Biden took performance-enhancing drugs before his better-than-expected State of the Union address. He lied that Kamala Harris, then vice president and the Democratic presidential nominee, used AI-generated images of crowds at her rallies. During a presidential debate, Trump bellowed nonsense about Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio.
, Trump claimed that Iran bombed one of its own elementary schools, killing more than 170 girls, on the first day of the US-Israeli war against Iran, even though evidence points to US culpability.

It’s gotten to the point that even within MAGA, some don’t believe Trump. A recent story in Wired revealed how some of Donald Trump's followers now believe that the first assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania., in July 2024, was staged by Trump.

Without question, the proliferation of AI has blurred the line between what is and isn’t real. That’s an assault on truth, but so is a president who🤥  lies as easily as he breathes.

Like Trump, too many no longer seem to care about evidence before they spread conspiracies to foster their specific worldviews. With social media as an accelerant, measured voices of reason don’t stand a chance, and that won’t end when Trump’s final term ends.

Under the treacherous rule of the most mendacious president in American history, we’ve become Generation Trust No One. And while conspiracies may offer false comfort especially in times of strife, they also become a coffin for truth.

We’ve been polluted by a man hostile toward facts and immune to honesty. That’s what Trump wants. Authoritarians thrive as self-anointed arbiters of information that is skewed, false, and only serves themselves and their hunger for power and control.

Donald Trump and the ghost of "will not die" Jeffrey Epstein files

On July 26, 2025, Donald Trump played a round of golf at his own Turnberry course in Scotland. 

Echo opinion by Fintan O'Toole published in The New York Review of Books: A Guy Who Never Dies

Over footage of the event from Sky News, we hear a reporter shouting, “Mr. Trump, can you escape the Jeffrey Epstein crisis?” At that point in the clip, the volume surges on the song Trump’s large entourage is blasting: “Memory” from the musical Cats. The tinny playback of the singer’s voice envelops Trump as he gets back in his golf cart and drives away: “It’s so easy to leave me/All alone with the memory/Of my days in the sun.”

Trump does not look like he’s enjoying the memory of the days when he and Epstein were close friends. But, Donald Trump's staff know this song is an aural comfort blanket for their boss. 

In her memoir, I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House, his former press secretary Stephanie Grisham writes that “when he was in a bad mood or a scary rage, we’d send for a staffer he referred to as ‘the Music Man.’” This aide would switch on “Trump's favorite songs—‘Memory’ from Cats, the Rolling Stones’ ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want,’ and others—and the staffer would go in and play the music to distract or calm him down. It was sort of like soothing the savage beast.”

What is it about “the Jeffrey Epstein crisis” that triggered the urgent need for this auditory pacifier? Ten days before the Turnberry incident, Trump uncharacteristically vented his scary rage on those of his loyal fans who were demanding the release of all official files on Epstein, ranting on Truth Social:

My PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker. They haven’t learned their lesson, and probably never will…. Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore!

Trump does not normally disavow support from anyone, however vile or extreme. For him to consign a large body of the MAGA base to a PAST (when presumably he and they knew what happiness was) suggests that something about the Epstein story gets under Trump’s very thick skin. It places him, for the first time in his astonishing political career, at the center of a cognitive maze from which he can see no exit.

For Trump, the great problem of the Epstein story is that it is the point at which paranoid fantasy melds into grotesque reality. It is a hybrid of fevered conspiracy theory and actual conspiracy. 

Jeffrey Epstein''s ghost: The Trumpian conspiracy that will not die

It lives at once in a gothic horror movie he has helped to script and in the all-too-tangible world of untrammeled power and merciless exploitation he actually inhabits. It provokes both wild surmises and entirely rational questions. This is a combustible mix that Trump does not know how to control.

Paranoia persists through every era of the history of the American republic. We can, for example, recall President John F. Kennedy speaking in 1961 of the far-right fringes of the Republican party: “They look suspiciously at their neighbors and their leaders. They call for ‘a man on horseback’ because they do not trust the people. They find treason in our churches, in our highest court, in our treatment of water.”

He could be talking about Trump-world. But not exactly. For not all conspiracy theories work the same way. They can take one of two distinct shapes. The first is a false “explanation” for real events. This is what Kennedy was referring to in 1961:

Financial crises could be explained by the presence of too many immigrants or too few greenbacks. War could be attributed to munitions makers or international bankers. Peace conferences failed because we were duped by the British, or tricked by the French, or deceived by the Russians. It was not the presence of Soviet troops in Eastern Europe that drove it to communism, it was the sellout at Yalta. It was not a civil war that removed China from the Free World, it was treason in high places.

This is the classic form of the conspiracy theory. There is a genuine and undisputed fact—China going communist, a financial crisis, a military defeat, fluoride in the water, wildfires devouring the land. What is hidden is the surreptitious motive force: Communists, Freemasons, Jews, Jewish Communists, Jewish space lasers.

Yet Trumpian paranoia doesn’t quite take this form. Conspiracy theories are crucial to Trump’s appeal, but his are indifferent to the reality or otherwise of the phenomena they seek to explain. 

Trump's made up conspiracies may relate to external facts. Immigration happened because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris connived to bring “more than 20 million criminals into the country.” An apparently sluggish economy is an illusion created by a “rigged” set of official job creation figures. They can also be pure fabrications: Barack Obama was not born in America. Ted Cruz’s father was implicated in the assassination of JFK. (“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being—you know, shot…. I mean, what was he doing—what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death❓”) 

Hillary Clinton was involved in an “unthinkable plot” to rig the 2016, presidential election by linking Trump to interference by Russia. To adapt A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Trump’s “imagination bodies forth/The forms of things unknown,…/Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name.”

Unlike the first, more basic kind of conspiracy theory, Trump’s version does not rely on agreed-upon public facts to generate emotions—fear, distrust, anger. As a federal judge put it in 2023 while dismissing Trump’s lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and others in relation to their alleged plot, the suit was “a hodgepodge of disconnected, often immaterial events, followed by an implausible conclusion.” “Immaterial events” is an apt phrase: in Trump’s conspiracy theories, there is no genuine surface to go behind. Both the “event” and its “explanation” are cut from whole cloth.

Yet this tactic has of course been spectacularly successful—it has helped Trump to become a two-time president. It works because, being pure invention, it does not need to concern itself with mere evidence. These conspiracies float in the Trumpian universe of alternative facts—otherwise known as fictions. They are part of the never-ending show in which Trump demands of his fans not belief in the veracity of his claims but rather suspension of disbelief. What matters is those emotions of dread and antagonism, and Trump has always understood that lurid fictions are the most effective in provoking them. It is striking, indeed, that when Trump had to provide alleged facts to support his most important conspiracy theory—the stealing of his victory in the 2020, presidential election—he was risibly helpless. He pursued over sixty law cases and all of them were thrown out (some by judges he himself had appointed) or withdrawn because he could not present the courts with anything other than outlandish concoctions.

For the most part, though, Trump has been able to operate in that world of immaterial events. He has been greatly assisted by the potency within his base of a conspiracy theory that is even further removed from the idea of evidence: QAnon. It is not his creation but it overlaps with his own conspiratorial strategies. It has the same free-floating freedom from any agreed reality, the same fictive exuberance.

QAnon, like Trump himself, is a comic provocation that became an American truth. As James Ball showed in his excellent The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World, it took off from the hacking by Russian intelligence and subsequent publication of a trove of e-mail archives belonging to Clinton’s adviser John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee. The Podesta e-mails were disappointingly dull—they disclosed no crimes or conspiracies. But, as Ball explains, they served as the template for a word game played on the Internet forum 4chan:

Whether as a joke, a troll or some sort of political act, a few 4chan users jumped on the Podesta emails and decided to try to stoke up some interest in them. 

One technique worked beyond the wildest imaginings of anyone involved. A group of users decided that the seemingly innocuous emails were in fact a code. “Hotdog,” they decided, meant “boy.” “Pizza” meant “girl.” “Cheese” meant “little girl,” while “ice cream” meant “male prostitute.” The seemingly innocuous Podesta email cache in reality contained proof of a highly sophisticated child abuse ring operated by key aides of Hillary Clinton—and they had cracked the code used to discuss their crimes.

By 2020, fewer than half of Americans polled by Ipsos for NPR definitively rejected the proposition that “a group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media,” with 37 percent unsure and 17 percent in agreement. In 2022, Trump semaphored his endorsement of QAnon by reposting an image of himself wearing a Q lapel pin bearing the words “The Storm is Coming.” (In QAnon’s arcane lexicon the “storm” is Trump’s version of the Last Judgment, when his satanic opponents will be tried, and perhaps executed, live on television.)

QAnon, like Trump’s own conspiracy theories, is a solution without a problem, a signifier without a signified. It recycles preexisting paranoid tropes: the antisemitic myth of Jews preying on Christian children (one of QAnon’s most visible early influencers ranted about the “synagogue of Satan”); the threat of witches in league with the devil; the promise of an omnipotent messiah (in this case Trump himself) who will vanquish the evildoers and instigate a new order. It also offers a more specific flight from contemporary reality: it is hard not to see the popularity of QAnon among conservative Christians as a displacement of the anxiety generated by the revelation of widespread child abuse by evangelical church leaders and Catholic priests. (One study found that in 2016, and 2017, when QAnon was taking off, there were “192 instances of a leader from an influential church or evangelical institution being publicly charged with sexual crimes involving a minor, including rape, molestation, battery and child pornography.”) The rerouting of these horrors onto a cabal of senior Democrats is a way of coping with the cognitive dissonance generated by the betrayals.

Trump could exploit QAnon because it functions in the way his own conspiracy theories do—in the absence of any agreed reality beyond itself. But only up to a point. That point has a local habitation and a name: Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein is the portal through which, as Ball puts it, “The real world provided a tantalizing way into the madness of QAnon.” And also the other way around: the Epstein case gave QAnon’s believers a foothold in reality. There truly was a highly sophisticated child abuse ring operated by a man with very close connections to business and political elites.

And there really are, as the investigative journalist Barry Levine recently noted in The New York Times, unanswered questions about Epstein’s ability to prey on children for so long with such impunity. How did he amass an estimated $600 million? How was he able to traffic girls and women into the US from Russia, Belarus, Turkey, and Turkmenistan without apparent interference from the immigration authorities? Why was Alex Acosta—who as the US attorney for the Southern District of Florida gave Epstein an extraordinary lenient plea deal—told, as he later claimed, that “Mr. Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone”? What is contained on the forty computer and electronic devices, twenty-six storage drives, more than seventy CDs, and six recording devices gathered by the FBI from Epstein’s properties?

And what exactly do all of these records say about Epstein’s close friendship over almost fifteen years with Trump, who told New York Magazine in 2002 that his pal was a “terrific guy” who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side”? In her book Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story, Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald journalist who did the most to expose the Epstein scandal, recounts claims made in a lawsuit filed by one of Epstein’s victims:

Once, Epstein took the girl to Mar-a-Lago, where he introduced her to Donald Trump. She was fourteen at the time and recalls that upon meeting Trump, Epstein elbowed him and said: “This is a good one, right?” Trump smiled and nodded in agreement, the suit says.

Brown also writes that “in early 2016, an anonymous woman filed a civil complaint in federal court in California, under the pseudonym ‘Katie Johnson.’ She alleged that she was sexually abused and raped by Trump and Epstein when she was thirteen, over a four-month period from June to September 1994.”

Such allegations may well be untrue, and of course Trump denies any knowledge of, much less involvement in, Epstein’s crimes. At the time of the Katie Johnson lawsuit Trump’s attorney Alan Garten told the Miami Herald that its claims were “unequivocally false.” (A federal judge dismissed the first Johnson suit in May 2016; two subsequent suits were withdrawn.) Brown notes that “there has never been any evidence that [Trump] had inappropriate sexual relations with minors.” 

Many people have many reasons to want to smear him by association with Epstein, and it is important not to fall into the trap of believing allegations because they chime with established preconceptions.

Trump’s difficulty with the QAnon-influenced section of his base, however, is that people whose preconceptions include the existence of a massive conspiracy of elite pedophile satanists are not well trained in the habits of skepticism. And for a time, rather than telling them to forget all about it, Trump encouraged those people to double down on their belief in a massive Epstein-related conspiracy. In August 2019, after Epstein’s apparent suicide in prison, Trump retweeted a post: “Died of SUICIDE on 24/7 SUICIDE WATCH? Yeah right! How does that happen #JefferyEpstein (sic) had information on Bill Clinton & now he’s dead.”

When he retweeted that post Trump clearly felt that Epstein really was safely dead and that questions about their long friendship had died with him. But in reality he was breathing life into Epstein’s corpse. To suggest that Epstein was murdered to silence him is to give him a vigorous afterlife of proliferating mysteries. In his current rage at the resurrection of this unfinished story, Trump railed against those who, instead of basking in the glory of his administration, keep talking about “a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.” This is a strange echo of one of the celebrity tributes received by Epstein on his sixty-third birthday in 2016 and recently published by The New York Times. Woody Allen compared the sumptuous dinners at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse to those hosted in Castle Dracula, “where Lugosi has three young female vampires who service the place,” and suggested, about Epstein, that “one can picture him sleeping in damp earth.”

The undead Epstein continues to stalk the land partly because of the overlap of his true story with QAnon’s wild imaginings and partly because his vampiric activities dramatize much larger realities. He embodies the monstrously exploitative operations of both patriarchy and social class. As with Dracula, the superrich overlord is the predator and the girls from working-class families are the prey. Many of Epstein’s victims lived in financially precarious households in West Palm Beach—as the Justice Department put it, they were “typically from single-mother households and difficult financial circumstances.” The two or three hundred dollars they were each offered to perform massages on middle-aged men was a lot of money for these girls and their families. To cross the bridge into Palm Beach was to enter a different world of extravagant opulence. This is a tale of two Americas, and of the awful things one of them can do to the other.

Trump’s political genius lies in his ability to embody these same realities of male power and economic abuse while simultaneously presenting himself as the savior of those who suffer under them. But Epstein is his all too obviously evil twin. He reminds Trump’s base what an exploitative elite really looks like. His network of friends and enablers brings back to their minds Trump’s original political message of 2015 and 2016: the idea that the true divide is not between Republicans and Democrats but between parasitic elites and ordinary people. His proximity to Epstein threatens to drag Trump back onto the side of that line where he actually belongs.

It is the hybrid nature of the Epstein conspiracy theory—part rational demand for answers to legitimate public concerns, part QAnon fever dream—that stymies Trump’s response. It generates within the MAGA base what C. Wright Mills once called (in a very different context) crackpot realism, the belief that mad questions (in this case the truth about the satanic pedophile cabal) can be answered by sensible means (reading the trove of documents and examining the recordings that constitute the Epstein files). The word puzzle that began with the substitution of “pizza” with “girl” will be solved by poring over and teasing out the true meaning of millions of other words—if only Trump would do what the Russians did with the Podesta e-mails and set them free.

This naive faith is the other side of the American paranoid imagination. Even while it conjures the vast potency of the conspirators, it also takes it for granted that, inside the archives of the deep state, they have carefully preserved detailed proof of their plots to assassinate JFK, hide the visitations of aliens, and enable the satanic child abusers. Crackpot realism has a strange trust in the bureaucracy. In it, that most dully bureaucratic of words—files—becomes a magic elixir of truth.

Trump’s great tactical mistake in the Epstein story was to keep playing into this belief. In September 2024, in an interview with the podcaster Lex Fridman, he went along with the suggestion that he would release the Epstein files alongside those relating to JFK’s assassination: “Yeah, I’d certainly take a look at it. Now, Kennedy’s interesting because it’s so many years ago. They do that for danger too, because it endangers certain people, et cetera, et cetera, so Kennedy is very different from the Epstein thing but I’d be inclined to do the Epstein. I’d have no problem with it.”

He ought to have known that, because of QAnon, anticipation of the release of the Epstein files is akin more to a millenarian religious fervor than to a documentary investigation. As Ball puts it, Trump serves in the QAnon worldview as “the genius mastermind orchestrating an equally complicated counter-movement” against the satanic cabal. The Epstein files are not just records of a criminal investigation, they are an updating of the Book of Revelation. To reveal them is to open the Seventh Seal and release God’s judgment onto the earth. How can the savior simply shrug and murmur that there is no seventh seal? It says a great deal about contemporary America that Trump’s breach of faith with this apocalyptic narrative is, for much of his political base, a far bigger betrayal than taking away its health care or failing to bring down food prices.

How could Trump find a way out of this maze? There are two threads he is trying to follow. One is to offer his base a substitute conspiracy theory: the whole Epstein story is a fiction, just another malicious invention. “I know it’s a hoax. It’s started by Democrats…. It’s all been a hoax.” In this he is trying to switch the story from the first kind of conspiracy theory (the one with an objective correlative in real public events) to the second kind (his own practice of positing a conspiracy with no real-world referent). He is hoping to shift Epstein from the kind of ground where he loses his bearings onto the terrain where he feels more comfortable.

But this can’t work. Epstein can’t be turned into a product of the Democrats’ evil imagination because he is every bit as real for the MAGA people as he is for woke liberals. Perhaps, indeed, even more so: he is the tangible substance that gives credibility to their darkest visions of how the world works. In thinking that he can simply order his supporters to convert this substance into a mere shadow thrown by Democratic conspirators, he is succumbing to the dictator’s delusion that he can exert complete control over the thoughts of his subjects.

The second escape route is to offer Epstein’s consort and pander Ghislaine Maxwell, who was sentenced to twenty years in prison in 2022, a pardon. In return, she would testify that Trump had nothing to do with Epstein’s crimes and incriminate Democrats instead. The difficulty with this strategy is twofold. First, once pardoned, Maxwell would be free to say whatever she liked. Second, among the crimes for which she was sentenced was, literally, conspiracy. Using a conspirator to reassure the conspiracy-minded that there was no conspiracy that could possibly involve Trump does not seem like a winning stratagem.

On August 5 the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee issued subpoenas for several witnesses to appear at planning hearings into Epstein’s crimes, including Bill and Hillary Clinton. But he also served the Justice Department a subpoena demanding that it produce its Epstein-related files by August 19. If Trump orders the department not to comply, he becomes part of the great conspiracy. This would become a satisfyingly shocking twist in this paranoid story: the good guy was actually the archvillain all along. If he allows it to comply, he feeds the beast he is trying to kill. We know that the release of documents never stops the search for the ultimate exposure of the plot. It gives the searchers a vast new terrain of clues and anomalies to explore, a giant new web of connections to map. And if Trump tries a middle course, releasing the documents with references to himself redacted, he merely proves that he has something to hide.

Will this bring him down? Almost certainly not. But it may deprive him of his greatest asset: his immunity from scandal. It is a force field that, once breached, ceases to function. If he loses his power to decree that all evidence of his misdeeds is a hoax, the rest of his term will be soundtracked not by the sweet melancholy of “Memory” but by the more agonized strains of “Suspicious Minds.”

Donald Trump's outrageous pre-transition decisions are already dangerous: There is nothing "peaceful" in his rhetoric

Donald Trump's sequel will be a bigger failure than his first trial run!

Maine Writer: Thanks to the Houston Chronicle for peeling back the veneer on the fake Trump participation in a smooth administrative transition.  Frankly, Trump was prepared for another January 6th insurrection if Vice-President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz had been elected.  All of which is to say, Donald Trump gets zero credit for supporting a smooth transition. Nevertheless, while the Biden administration delivers toward the peaceful transition, Donald Trump has exposed his incompeence in a series of chaotic decisions about cabinet nominees, creating explosive policies about mass exportations, tariffs, and making outrageous claims about how the United States can create Canada as a 51st state, purchase the Island of Greenland from Denmark and reclaim the Panama Canal.  Preposterous! Echo opinion published at this site here:

Jackie Calmes opinion: It’s great that the transfer of power following the November 2024, election is proceeding peacefully, as it always has except at the onset of the Civil War, and, yes, in 2021. 

Yet, you can thank President Joe Biden, Vice President Harris and their fellow Democratic good losers for that, not Trump. 

No one can credibly doubt that, had he lost again, he’d be raising another ruckus. Or worse, that there’d be violence. Trump suggested as much, telling Time in April, “If we don’t win, you know, it depends.”

States and the federal government prepared for mayhem that never came. Gabriel Sterling, the top Georgia election officer who four years ago publicly and presciently warned Trump that “someone’s going to get killed” because of his provocations, and who endured death threats himself, said of the electors' meeting this week, “To be honest, I forgot about it.”

As Trump declared in last month’s victory speech, “It’s time to unite.”

But as Biden said afterward in congratulating him: “You can’t love your country only when you win.”

Biden — who still hasn’t received acknowledgment of Biden’s 2020, victory, let alone congratulations, and who, thanks to Trump, is considered illegitimate by seven of 10 Republicans — expressed hope that “we can lay to rest the question about the integrity of the American electoral system. … It can be trusted, win or lose.”

Indeed. And that’s why, in this week of the uneventful electoral college vote, (Did you miss it❓ On Tuesday, the electoral college made official what we’ve known for six weeks: Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris for the presidency) - Americans should take the occasion to note the damage that Trump has wrought to the citizenry’s faith in elections by his years of demagogically disparaging them — instead of joining him and his MAGA minions in memory-holing their falsehoods about election fraud.

Trump has gone silent about “rigged” elections since he won in November. And yet, up to the final hours of voting, he was crying foul. “A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia. Law Enforcement coming!!!” he posted on election day.

City and state officials, including Seth Bluestein, a Republican member of Philadelphia’s board of elections, reposted Trump’s lie to insist there was “absolutely no truth” to it. For that, Bluestein suffered antisemitic attacks and threats online. Countless election workers have known the feeling. Thanks, Trump.

Days earlier, Trump claimed, “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before.” He spread a false conspiracy theory of vote stealing in one county, adding, “We caught them cold.” No, he hadn’t; there were no vote thieves to catch.

After Trump won Pennsylvania — surprise! — he clammed up about Democrats' alleged heists there and in all six other battleground states that he carried, including four states governed by Democrats. I guess as vote riggers go, Democrats are just inept?

Even before the election, Trump stifled his talk that early and mail voting are rife with fraud, but only after advisors, apoplectic that Republican candidates were being shortchanged, appealed to his “yuge” ego: “Sir, your people are so excited to vote for you that they want to as soon as they can,” one said during an April meeting at Mar-a-Lago. “You gotta tell them it’s OK.”

Trump has not, however, changed his tune about the 2020, election. The president-elect continues to lie that he won it, so routinely that reporters let it go unchecked ❗😧 What’s worse, looking ahead, is that Trump reportedly is making fealty to his election lies a job requirement for appointees to high-level administration posts.

So it is that he’s tapped former Florida Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi to be U.S. attorney general. She was part of “the first wave of the Big Lie,” as former Trump White House aide Alyssa Farah Griffin put it to the House Jan. 6 investigation committee. Bondi rushed to Pennsylvania after the 2020 election to spread disinformation about dead voters and ballot dumps. She was with lead election denier Rudy Giuliani for Team Trump’s ludicrous news conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in a Philadelphia industrial park. And she was fulminating on Fox News: “We are not going anywhere until they declare Trump won Pennsylvania.”

In 2022, former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson told the January 6, committee that Bondi contacted her before she testified to press Hutchinson to remain loyal to Trump, according to the Washington Post. (Yet, it’s former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chair, that House Republicans now want prosecuted for witness tampering for her talks with Hutchinson.) This year, Bondi echoed Trump’s falsehoods about noncitizens voting from her platform as a leader of a pro-Trump policy institute. And she promised retribution for Trump’s indictments: “The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted.”

No doubt Bondi as the next attorney general would carry out Trump’s calls for the Justice Department to investigate the 2020 election, to prosecute Biden and to get House Jan. 6 committee members behind bars.

“Is she going to continue … pushing out the Big Lie?” California’s new Democratic senator and January 6 committee veteran Adam Schiff recently asked on MSNBC.

That was a rhetorical question, of course.

Jackie Calmes is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

Dec 20, 2024

Jackie Calmes:  Trump’s acknowledgment of Biden’s 2020 victory, let alone congratulations, and who, thanks to Trump, is considered illegitimate by seven of 10 Republicans — expressed hope that “we can lay to rest the question about the integrity of the American electoral system. … It can be trusted, win or lose.”

Democrats must strategically educate voters about how Donald Trump will fail. Chaos will damage average people

Voters will witness the metaphoric impact of political Narcan when Donald Trump signs his draconian executive orders and pushes unqualified nominees into public hearings for Senate confirmation.

Democrats may be in the (very slim) minority, but they are not yet an opposition. What’s the difference?

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Jamelle Bouie.

An opposition would use every opportunity it had to demonstrate its resolute stance against the incoming administration. 

Opposition would do everything in its power to try to seize the public’s attention and make hay of the president-elect’s efforts to put lawlessness at the center of American government. 

An opposition would highlight the extent to which Donald Trump has no intention of fulfilling his pledge of lower prices and greater economic prosperity for ordinary people and is openly scheming with the billionaire oligarchs who paid for and ran his campaign to gut the social safety net and bring something like Hooverism back from the ash heap of history.

An opposition would treat the proposed nomination of figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth as an early chance to define a second Trump administration as dangerous to the lives and livelihoods of ordinary Americans. It would prioritize nimble, aggressive leadership over an unbending commitment to seniority and the elevation of whoever is next in line. Above all, an opposition would see that politics is about conflict — or, as Henry Adams famously put it, “the systematic organization of hatreds” — and reject the risk-averse strategies of the past in favor of new blood and new ideas.

The Democratic Party lacks the energy of a determined opposition — it is adrift, listless in the wake of defeat. Too many elected Democrats seem ready to concede that Trump is some kind of avatar for the national spirit — a living embodiment of the American people. They’ve accepted his proposed nominees as legitimate and entertained surrender under the guise of political reconciliation. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, for example, praised Elon Musk, a key Trump lieutenant, as “the champion among big tech executives of First Amendment values and principles.” Senator Chris Coons of Delaware similarly praised Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a glorified blue-ribbon commission, as a potentially worthwhile enterprise — “a constructive undertaking that ought to be embraced.” And a fair number of Democrats have had friendly words for the prospect of Kennedy going to the Department of Health and Human Services, with credulous praise for his interest in “healthy food.”

Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey said last month. “I have concerns, obviously, about people leading in our country who aren’t based in science and fact.” 

And at least two Democrats want President Joe Biden to consider a pardon for incoming President Trump. “The Trump hush money and Hunter Biden cases were both bullshit, and pardons are appropriate,” Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania wrote in his first post on Trump’s social networking website.

Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina also said that Biden should consider a pardon for Trump as a way of “cleaning the slate” for the country. “If we keep digging at things in the past, I’m not too sure the country will not lose its way,” he said in a conversation on MSNBC with Jonathan Capehart. 

But, unmentioned was Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, which did not clean the slate of American politics as much as it made legal and political impunity the lodestar of Republican presidential politics.

Other Democrats have decided, in the wake of Trump’s popular vote victory, that aggressive, full-spectrum opposition to his priorities is a mistake. “Here is what I am not going to do for the next two years and the next four years,” Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, said in a news conference after the election. “I’m not going to deal with ‘It’s Tulsi Gabbard one day, then an hour later it’s Matt Gaetz, then the next day it’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then he says something on Truth Social, and then the people connected to him are doing something outrageous.’ No, that I’m not doing, because that’s all a distraction.”

It seems strange to think that it is not the job of an opposition to oppose — especially when the people in question have little business in government — but Jeffries isn’t alone in thinking that it is to the advantage of Democrats to hold their powder and avoid direct confrontations. He is in line with high-level Democratic strategists who also think that it is a mistake for Democrats to make noise, draw attention and seize the initiative.

“A pollster to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign told top Democratic Party officials recently that they must confront President-elect Donald Trump far differently than they did during his first term,” Holly Otterbein reported in Politico, “urgently pressing them not to focus on every outrage but instead argue that he is hurting voters’ pocketbooks.” According to the pollster, voters don’t care about who he’s putting in cabinet positions and will “give him a pass on the outrageous” if costs come down. (❓- but Trumpzi  already admitted that his fake promise to bring down costs will be difficult❗ to accomplish - ya'think❓. IOW, he lied to voters and they bought the "pig in a poke" message. OMG❗)

At the heart of all of this — whether it comes from congressional leaders, ordinary lawmakers or top pollsters — is the idea that Democrats can float above the fray and reap the political rewards of any chaos and dysfunction. Besides, voters say they want compromise — and what else can Democrats do but follow the polls?

It’s as if Democrats see politics as a stable landscape — a static field with clear rules. They can respond to voters, but they cannot shape the basic orientation of the electorate. 

By this view, most Americans are fixed in place and Democrats must meet them where they are. If voters don’t seem to care about corruption, impropriety and incompetence, then there’s nothing Democrats can do to make them care.

But this is not true. We know as much because Trump just won an election demonstrating that it’s not true. Trump rehabilitated himself through relentless self-promotion. He built a constituency for tariffs and mass deportation through endless repetition connected to some basic concerns. His “stop the steal” obsession put him at the center of Republican Party politics. He captured space in American cultural life and refused to let go, winning political power in the process.

Democrats can’t replicate this behavior, but there are lessons to learn from it — the first and foremost being that the public will not make connections and draw conclusions unless you do it for them. And that takes a willingness, again, to seize attention, to throw everything at the wall with the hope that something will stick. 

If Democrats, following the pocketbook strategy, want voters to blame Trump for any price hikes during his administration, they need to do everything they can now, in as dramatic a fashion as they can manage, to make Trump the culprit — to give voters a language with which they can express their anger at the status quo.

If Democrats want voters to blame Trump for any potential foreign policy failures, they must work now to highlight and emphasize the extent to which the president-elect - Trumpzi- wants a more or less inexperienced set of hacks and dilettantes to lead the nation’s national security establishment. 

Even something as obvious as the connection between Trump’s billionaire allies and his support for large, upper-income tax cuts has to be dramatized and made apparent to the voting electorate.

At this stage, there’s little evidence that Democrats are willing to do any of this. Given the opportunity, for example, to effect a changing of the guard — to promote younger and more aggressive voices like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to leadership, even if it upsets the usual rules of seniority, as I mentioned earlier — Democrats said, in effect, No thanks.

This is a grave mistake. Trump’s hand is not as strong as it looks. He has a narrow, and potentially unstable, Republican majority in the House of Representatives and a small, but far from filibuster-proof, majority in the Senate. He’ll start his term a lame duck, with less than 18 months to make progress before the start of the next election cycle. And his great ambition — to impose a form of autarky on the United States — is poised to spark a thermostatic reaction from a public that elevated him to deal with high prices and restore a kind of normalcy. But Democrats won’t reap the full rewards of a backlash if they do nothing to prime the country for their message.

There are other reasons for Democrats to try to take the initiative. There are still many Americans rightfully concerned with an authoritarian turn in the United States. Again, just over half the electorate did not vote for Trump. They deserve leadership, too. Indeed, the party’s refusal to fight sends ripples through civic life. If Democratic leaders won’t fight, then it’s hard to expect civil society, or just ordinary people, to pick up the slack. Either democracy was on the ballot in November or it wasn’t, and if it was, it makes no political, ethical or strategic sense to act as if we live in normal times.

It is not a distraction to vocally oppose Trump’s would-be nominees or highlight his extreme intentions. Democrats should look at every aspect of the next Trump administration as an opportunity to do, well, politics — to demonstrate their values and show the extent to which this president has no plan to pursue the public good. The quiet and supposedly responsible approach of the past four years is a dead end. Attention is the only currency that matters, and Democrats need some to spend.

Abraham Lincoln was assisted in his first campaign for president by a cadre of young, costumed men who campaigned, marched in the streets and showed militant enthusiasm for the Republican Party. These “Wide Awakes” were as flamboyant and provocative as any movement that has ever emerged in the history of American politics, and they soon held the attention of the entire nation, friend and foe alike. The 1860 election was not, the historian Jon Grinspan wrote, “a dry government process but a public confrontation, and the Wide Awakes had formed to help Republicans fight back.”

So it was and so it is. American politics has always been a game of performance and spectacle, from the whiskey-fueled street debates of the early Republic to the raucous conventions of the first Gilded Age. To be sterile and sober-minded in this arena is to be, for the most part, a loser.

DonOLD Trump Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden shows people leaving in videos

Whatever happened to Lindsey Graham❓ . He said "whaaaaa❓"  Lindsey Graham urges voters to "reject" generals' critical views of Trump

Madison Square Garden in 1939

Ahead of Donald Trump's campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York one GOP strategist Doug Heye critiqued the former president for holding one in a state where he trails Vice President Kamala Harris by double digits, calling it "wasted time." (Published in Newsweek by Natalie Venegas) 

As Election Day quickly approaches, the race between Trump, the GOP nominee, and Harris, the Democratic nominee, remains extremely tight, with the outcome largely depending on swing states, as both candidates continue campaigning across the country.

While New York is a reliably blue state, and Democratic candidates typically win statewide easily because of massive margins in New York City, Trump has continued to campaign there as he has held several other campaign events including rallies in the Bronx and Nassau County on Long Island.

"Whether you're talking about Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, I'd say time spent out of the seven key states that are the swing states that could turn this election by and large is wasted time. 

Your time is better spent in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Nevada, Arizona et cetera than it is in Texas or in Washington, D.C. or in New York," Heye, a former communications director for the Republican National Committee (RNC), said on Sunday in an interview with CNN's Rahel Solomon.

Heye explained that while the rally will likely get coverage, it may fall short of reaching young male voters, a group Trump has recently aimed to reach.

"But with this Trump event yes, it's gonna get a lot of coverage––although a lot of people, especially young males, who Trump wants to win with big margins, will probably be watching football 🏉...Every political campaign that you're on, there's always some event that makes staff sort of scratch their heads 😖and say 'Why are we doing this in this way❓" and the answer is always to scratch that itch that a candidate has."

Republicans want to institutionalize evil Project 2025 to destroy democracy and create a Viktor Orbán autocracy

Echo opinion letter published in the Boston Globe:

Response❗ “Project 2025 isn’t going away”💥 (Opinion, Sept. 28): Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, shamelessly admits the organization wants to “institutionalize Trumpism.” What could that mean other than substituting blatant, corrosive lies for the truth, everywhere?

Republicans want to institutionalize Trumpziism as described in Project 2025

The “heritage” this Orwellian-named, transparent propaganda arm of the GOP 🐘 actually promotes is a sordid history of right-wing duplicity, voter suppression, and bad faith. Consider what its cofounder Paul Weyrich once said: “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people … As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”


Conservatism as practiced by such cynics is a movement of reactionary apologists for wealth and privilege. Their fever dream is to cancel Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid while unleashing even more corporate fraud upon the body politic, returning us to the days of the 19th-century robber barons.

Project 2025, is a plan to transform the United States into an autocracy akin to what Donald Trump’s hero Viktor Orbán did to Hungary. Americans need to make sure that does not happen by electing Kamala Harris decisively on Nov. 5. #VoteBlue

From Bryan L. Tucker in Jamaica Plain Massachusetts (Boston)

I think therefore I cannot support Donald Trump! Everytime I see a Trump sign causes me to worry about the integrity of the person who is behind it

Echo opinion letters published in The New York Times:

Trump Insults Harris’s Mental Fitness, Adding to Questions About His Own:  Re “Republicans Fault Trump Over Insults to His Rival” (news article, Sept. 30):

The New York Times report that Donald Trump referred to Kamala Harris, a woman of color, as being born “mentally disabled” while he maintains that Joe Biden, a white man, became mentally disabled. That’s nothing new. It’s Mr. Trump’s old playbook.

He has referred to Representative Maxine Waters of California, a Black woman, as “low I.Q. Maxine Waters.” I have seen nothing to indicate that Kamala Harris is mentally disabled or that Maxine Waters has a “low I.Q.”

By questioning the mental capacity of women of color Trump is trying to send a not-so-subtle subliminal message about people of color being “less than,” and, therefore “less deserving,” than whites.

This is a continuation of Mr. Trump’s long history of racism. 

• From housing discrimination in the 1970s, 
• to his ads calling for the execution of the Central Park Five in the 1980s, 
• to birtherism during Barack Obama’s presidency, 
• to the remark about “very fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, 

Trump has demonstrated time and again that he is unfit to serve as president.

From Dave Schraeger, Hamilton, N.J.

To the Editor:  Regarding Donald Trump calling Kamala Harris “mentally disabled” and “mentally impaired”: By most measures Vice President Harris won the presidential debate against Mr. Trump. What does that say about Mr. Trump’s mental acuity?

From John G. Williams in Wayne, Pa.

Donald Trump and Leon Musk are now on record for engaging in illegal union busting!

Echo opinion from the Editorial Board of the Houston Chronicle

Anti-Trump stamp

Thumbs down 👎: Democrats sure pulled a (brilliant)🌟⭐ switcheroo in the presidential race and now Donald Trump is trying to regain the offensive by attacking Kamala Harris on the economy. 

File under - "You cannot make this stuff up." 😠😧

In one press conference, Trump - the self proclaimed "billionaire"❓ 😵😑😮 discussed inflation by comparing a tiny Tic Tac container with a normal one. Another time, he stood next to a table piled with Folgers Coffee, Fruit Loops and uncooked bacon while reading from a three-ring binder: “Kamala Harris is a radical California liberal who broke the economy, broke the border and broke the world, frankly.” A little hyperbole to go with your Fruit Loops? 

Then, Trump sat for a rambling interview with a guy who actually did break the world after gaining fame and fortune trying to save it: Elon Musk*. After the Tesla pioneer and Twitter killer struggled for 40 minutes to get the livestream going with Trump, the former president praised the part-time Texas billionaire for threatening to fire workers who go on strike, after which Musk laughed and said, “Yeah.” 

So, the United Auto Workers promptly filed lawsuits against both alleging they intimidated union members. “When we say Donald Trump is a scab, this is what we mean,” UAW President Shawn Fain said in a statement. Meanwhile, we’re not sure if Sean O’Brien is regretting about now his decision to become the first Teamster president to address the Republican National Convention last month after Trump invited him but he seems to have lost his peacemaker tone, calling Trump’s comments to Musk “economic terrorism.”

*P.S. NOTE:  In response to Donald Trump's live stream on X with Elon Musk, Kamala Harris' campaign released a statement saying, "Trump's entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself -- self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a live stream in the year 2024."😂