With everyone concentrating on their holiday celebrations, people may have missed a few of President Trump’s most deranged missives that he tweeted out in a blizzard of lunacy over the Christmas break.
Fortunately, Walter Shaub, the former director of the United States Office of Government Ethics, was paying attention. He read one of Trump’s Christmas eve tweets and was so gob-smacked by the audacious assertions that the president claimed that he felt compelled to translate the manic frothing of Trump’s mendacity into the truth of observable reality.
In one of his multiple daily obsessive propaganda posts hyping the world’s most simplistic and ineffective solution to border control, President Trump boasted of having just awarded a construction contract for a portion of a “Wall” in Texas, as if he were still a property developer rather than the president. He further claimed that, despite being in the midst of a government shutdown of his own devisement, that the government was already erecting and refurbishing large portions of “Wall” with parts already finished.
I am in the Oval Office & just gave out a 115 mile long contract for another large section of the Wall in Texas. We are already building and renovating many miles of Wall, some complete. Democrats must end Shutdown and finish funding. Billions of Dollars, & lives, will be saved!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 24, 2018
Walter Shaub, a long-time Trump antagonist, pointed out the absurdity of the president’s tweet with a detailed list of Trump’s detours from the actual facts and the implications of his false claims.
The White House doesn’t handle these procurements, the government is still in the midst of the Trump Shutdown, the procurement officials were not working on Christmas Eve, and Congress didn’t approve the funding. So this tweet is either a lie or an admission to violations of law.
— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) December 25, 2018
Given the pathological nature of Trump’s inability to make a statement that isn’t filled to the brim with a stew of verbal horse manure, it’s surprising that a small, but still sizeable, number of people take anything he says seriously.
However, as Shaub points out, Trump’s delusional statements in this instance can be categorized either as a completely unacceptable lack of truthfulness from someone holding the office of the President of The United States or as an admission of guilt of violations of the constitutional separation of powers.
At the very least the president’s tweet opens a window into the complete lack of understanding Trump has of government regulations and processes, his authoritarian ambitions, and his lack of respect for any rule of law that may thwart those ambitions.
#InvokeThe25th
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