Trump spouts endess lies and conspiracy theories in interview with Chuck Todd — again

23 June 2019

NBC's Meet the Press broadcast a pre-recorded interview with Donald Trump today. As usual, it featured rampant lying, because Donald Trump lies about everything, all the time, in his narcissistic efforts to pretend whatever he's doing is impossibly brilliant and categorically successful. The program left most of his lies unchallenged—or, in fact, further promoted them—despite having days to analyze his responses and identify which responses were untrue.

In that shameful puddle of not-journalism, one of Trump's more bizarre moments was again trotting out his own personal conspiracy theory that the only reason he didn't win the popular vote last time around ("That bothered you, didn't it," was interviewer Chuck Todd's pithy probe) was because millions of fraudulent votes.

"I'll say something that, again, is controversial. There were a lot of votes that I don't believe."

He then spiraled in to the theory he has repeated numerous times before: "There was much illegal voting." The accusation remains absolutely nonsensical; his evidence, such as it is, consists of repeating conspiracy theories from the darkest corners of the Stupid Internet. Anyone on the planet can burp something into the "president's" Twitter feed and get him to believe largely anything, so long as it flatters him to believe it; put the claim on Fox News—on the regularly conspiracy-clutching Fox & Friends, for example, and it will be engraved into his hardening brain.

Careening from one bit of lunatic bluster to the next, Trump mused that if we didelecte presidents by popular vote, "I would have done, I think, even better," and "the Electoral College is tougher for a Republican to win than the popular vote, at least me."

All of this is egregiously wrong, of course, and part of Trump's compulsive efforts to refashion reality in accordance with whatever version would make him look better. If he wanted to win the popular vote he would have done so, via his own genius and just because; the Electoral College is not tougher for Republicans to win than the popular vote, as demonstrated by multiple Republicans doing just that; the notion that millions of illicit votes were cast in California in a still-secret conspiracy is batshit insane, and Trump's willingness to undermine his voters' faith in democracy in a continued pouting bid to defend not winning that popular vote is grotesque, contemptible, malevolent, putrid, and summarily impeachable all on its own.

In the meantime, Donald Trump has again been very credibly charged with another rape. If any—any—other elected figure was so charged, their party-demanded resignation would be swift. Until, that is, the Trump "presidency", when his party decided that even criminal sexual assault was not disqualifying for a president, or a senator, or a Supreme Court justice—so long as it was their own. It joins a list that already includes obstruction of justice, inciting supporters against the free press, an "absolute" nullification of congressional investigative powers, and overt propagandizing of the sort commonplace in authoritarian regimes.

The man continues to be a danger to our democracy itself. If each of our previous norms could fall so quickly, all of it tossed to the whims of the party's gaudiest, pettiest, crookedest official, there is no reason to expect anything but further degradation. It is not because Trump is any of those things: It is because he is all those things, and his party—and the press—now accepts it.