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Sunday, August 21, 2016

"Donald Trump Knows Exactly What He's Doing," Paul Waldman, The Week

Donald Trump knows exactly what he's doing
Paul Waldman, The Week
The Federal Trade Commission, which polices advertising in America, will punish you if you lie in an advertisement for your product. But you're allowed to make claims that fall under the heading of "puffery," which means they're so absurd that no one could take them to be literally true. If the Gap tells you that if you buy one of their T-shirts the hottest girl in school will go to the prom with you, it doesn't count as a false claim, because it's too silly to be believed.

You'd think the same basic rule would apply to politics. There are some claims worth fact-checking — Has the economy created 15 million jobs since the Great Recession? Would repealing ObamaCare throw 20 million people off their health coverage? — and some that aren't. There are lies politicians tell that we let go because they're meaningless ("It's great to be here at the state fair on this 100-degree day!") and some things they say that are so ridiculous, we don't even need to explore them.

So it was when Donald Trump decided a couple of days ago to say, "ISIS is honoring President Obama. He is the founder of ISIS. He is the founder of ISIS. He's the founder. He founded ISIS." It's so ludicrous that we don't actually need to assess the accuracy of the claim, right?

Wrong. This is the 2016 presidential campaign, this is the man Republicans have nominated to the presidency, and these are the people to whom he's appealing. So we do.

As an informed person, upon hearing this you probably said, "Oh, well Trump just means that by pulling out of Iraq, Obama helped create a situation which enabled ISIS to evolve out of a pre-existing radical terrorist group. He's not literally saying Obama founded the group, just that his decisions eventually led to their rise." But you'd be wrong, because conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt tried to give Trump that out, and Trump declined to take it. "I know what you meant. You meant that he created the vacuum, he lost the peace," Hewitt said when he had Trump on his show Thursday. "No, I meant he's the founder of ISIS. I do," Trump responded. "But he's not sympathetic to them. He hates them. He's trying to kill them," Hewitt replied. "I don't care," said Trump. "He was the founder."

So now journalists have to actually run fact-checks debunking the idea that Barack Obama founded ISIS. Congratulations, America.

To paraphrase Marco Rubio, don't think Donald Trump doesn't know what he's doing — he knows exactly what he's doing. In the same speech, Trump pointedly referred to "Barack Hussein Obama," just in case anyone forgot that the president isn't really one of us. Trump, of course, launched an effort in 2011 to prove once and for all that Obama is a foreigner who was not actually born in the United States, but what you may not realize is thatto this day Trump has never admitted that the president is, in fact, an American.

And he's got a lot of company. You might have thought the lunatic conspiracy theory about Obama actually being born abroad and falsifying his birth records would have been relegated by now to a tiny fringe. Alas, it is not. 

An NBC/Survey Monkey poll taken just this week showed that only 27 percent of Republicans think Obama was born in the United States. Twenty-seven percent.

And why wouldn't they? For eight years their leaders have been telling them that despite all appearances, Obama is literally trying to destroy the United States — not Joe Biden literally, but literally literally. They've heard it from politicians, they've heard it from media figures, they've heard it again and again and again. And no matter how many times they get told it isn't true, they go on believing it.



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