Listen to the full audio. Everything he says is 100% wrong, including “tariff was not a word until the 1870s.” This is bespoke historical fantasy, unsupported by anything any historian has ever written. The arrogance required to be this wrong is astounding. And he’s basing public policy on it.
Journalists find this impossible to process, because at best they might recognize falsehoods (not daring to call them lies), but Trump #gaslights, projecting a totally imaginary world-as-he-wants-it-to-be & they have no framework to deal with that.
What is so “impossible to process” about a transparent, self-serving lie? Competent journalists can easily recognise and call them out; non-US journalists do it to Trump - he hates it. US journalists never do, perhaps keen to preserve their White House access, and so he just keeps on doing it.
I think you misunderstand me. Sure it's vastly better to call out lies than to ignore or accept them. But just calling out a lie doesn't reveal the truth, which is what the journalist's job is. They need analytic tools & a descriptive language so that folks can understand what's going on. 1/2
An individual journalist can't do this alone. It's a collective responsibility & a collective failure that the media has failed to identify & describe what's going on. 2/2
I don't see what analytic tools or descriptive language is lacking. The man puts forward a fiction in which he looks good and his actions are fully justified. So has every authoritarian strongman in world history. The challenge to the journalist is not some conceptual leap or new analysis. (1/2)
In "A Brief History of Fascist Lies" Federico Finchelstein explains: "Lying is a feature of fascism in a way that is not true of those other political traditions. Lying is incidental to, say, liberalism, in a way that it is not to fascism." Handling THAT is what journalists lack the tools for.
The question is whether call the fiction out as fiction and report the truth - at the risk of retribution, or whether to accept the premise and report his statements with some handwringing - in the hope the strongman can be reasoned with. The challenge is one of (collective, yes) courage. (2/2)
This is Howard Lutnick crap, and to our (my) great shame because Lutnick's father, Solomon Lutnick, taught U.S. history at Queens College before his tragic and no doubt trumatic death when Howard was 17yo.
I might add that this is potentially a story worthy of your talents....
Tariff of Abominations feels ignored. Trump is an abomination...and they wanted an income tax in part to make up for the loss of revenue they knew prohibition would incur.
The word you’re looking for is “dementia.”
The revolution was fought over tariffs!
And no one is talking seriously about his obvious mental deterioration.
Indeed.
He’s basing public policy on the idea that people in Los Angeles leave their garage doors and the trunks of their cars open for thieves because crime is so bad. IT IS INSANE!
He’s now resorted to jerking off under his desk to hide his mangled, small hands
He wants to shove this country back to the 1850s.
The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the word was used in the late 1500s to talk about economics and commerce.
I’m sorry. I cannot choose to listen to another hundred lies. Both my brain and my heart are broken enough for the moment.