Trump supporters don't want to talk about Trump

[Dill]

(05-14-2018, 04:07 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: We have spent decades accepting the fact that politicians lie to us on a regular basis. That got us here. Trump is only different in that he lies about stupid shit instead of just the really important things. I think calling out lies is fine, but there are sites and organizations that do that sort of thing, already.

I don't think we have spent decades "accepting" the fact that politicians lie to us on a regular basis.  "Lie" is itself a very politicized, spun up term nowadays. Bush I lost an election because circumstances forced him to raise taxes. And so he became a "liar."  But most Reagan voters didn't call Reagan a liar when he did the same thing 8 years before. 

And Hillary lost an election because she was successfully portrayed as a liar--in part by the ultimate liar.

Politicians who tell the truth have a very hard time getting elected. So I am not going to blame Trump on "the politicians." The increasingly bad judgment of voters got us Trump, most of whom had swallowed a mountain of lies about immigration, climate change, "the Clintons," Muslims, foreign policy, the economy, and Obama's origins which saturated the right-wing media sphere well before Trump announced he was running. Few of those lies originated with politicians.

Trump does not just lie about stupid shit, like how many people attended his inauguration. And some stupid shit isn't really stupid shit, like whether he had an affair with a porn star and paid her off, via a mob-style "fixer," with money from a fund into which a Russian oligarch had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Or like whether Obama was born in Kenya and Mexico sends us "rapists."

Rather, he most always lies about the really important things--US murder rates are the highest they have ever been; we're the highest taxed nation in the world; the Iran Deal freed Iran to make a bomb in 7 years; there was no collusion with Russia.  

And all these lies--stupid, not really, and important--fog our political discourse and hamper accountability. A recent CNN poll showed that 63% of Americans wanted to stay in the Iran deal, but as Juan Williams recently pointed out, the same poll showed that 62% erroneously believed that Iran, not the US, had violated the deal. http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/387468-juan-williams-trumps-dangerous-lies-on-iran. Worst of all, almost a third of the electorate believe some "deep state" is responsible for the current chaos in the White House--not any deficiency in Trump's personnel or policy choices.

"Calling out" Trump lies in this forum, where it is clear that Trump supporters are unfamiliar with "sites and organizations that do that sort of thing already," is a kind of public service.  

For me the issue is not about "changing Trump" or flying into a rage about every lie when no one can keep up. It is about assessing which are most harmful and their consequences, and about contesting the normalization of bad judgment and bad behavior, and about restoring accountability--with regard to voters as well as politicians.