'For Trump, lying is central to his disturbed psyche, and to his success.' sullydish writes
Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images “I like the truth. I’m actually a very honest guy,” President Trump told a slightly incredulous George Stephanopoulos this week. Like almost everything Trump says, it was, of course, a lie. But it was a particularly Trumpish kind of lie. It was so staggeringly, self-evidently untrue, and so confidently, breezily said, it was less a statement of nonfact than an expression of pure power.
On the affair with Stormy Daniels: “Never happened,” he told Bannon. And when Trump insisted on these things, he was in the moment believable. This preternatural capacity to lie convincingly even when the truth is obvious is a very rare skill. Which is why it works, of course. You simply assume that a grown man with real responsibility wouldn’t behave that way. And you would be wrong.
The joke, in the end, of course, was on them. Reality destroyed them, as it often does. In that time period, however, it also destroyed hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. Wolff’s analysis is that Trump actually intimidated Mueller, who refused to enter the public fray out of a sense of responsibility but also because no sane person who isn’t in elected office wants to become the next piñata. And battling Trump is very hard for sane people, with a solid reputation, to sustain. You never come out okay. For Mueller to fight back would have dragged him into an insufferably vulgar mire. He demurred, assuming that Congress would immediately spring into action.
The worry about a president receiving assistance from a foreign country, let alone inviting it, was one of the central concerns of the Founders when they came up with the mechanism of impeachment. It need not be a conspiracy or a crime. It was about violating the integrity of the American political system — to the advantage of another country. They were thinking of Britain and France, their equivalent of Russia and China. And they were understandably paranoid about it.
I knew Boris at Oxford. He was at Balliol and I was at Magdalen, but we were both debaters in the Oxford Union, and he became president of the Union in 1986, three years after I did, in 1983. We overlapped in his freshman year and, as president, I always loved calling on him to speak before the House, because it was never dull. Union politics back then was cutthroat but also huge fun, and I became quite fond of him because it was hard not to. He charms. He amuses.
This reputation hurt Boris in hunting for votes to be president of the Oxford Union, and he lost the first time around to someone called Neil Sherlock who was a nerdy state school kid. Legend has it Johnson kept reinventing himself politically and playing down his Toryism and poshness — with the help of then-student Frank Luntz, believe it or not — and eventually it worked and he won. I have to say I found him hugely entertaining, and great company, but could never really take him seriously.
He once said, with characteristic brio, that “my chances of being PM are about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or my being reincarnated as an olive.” That was as colorful as it was untrue. But there is some sweet cosmic justice in Boris having to take responsibility for the Brexit he backed. It may be a catastrophe, but it will be his, and, for him at least, it sure will be fun.Asylum is one of the noblest contributions to the world that a free society can offer.
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