You know that things are bad when the most plausible explanation for the contents of President Trump’s tweets is that he exists in an alternate universe from the rest of the planet.
The Trump universe is like the Bizarro world from Superman comics where everything is the opposite of what you’d expect on earth. Lies are the truth in this world, so the president’s insistence on relying exclusively on them for his public communications seems normal.
In our real world, however, Trump’s tweets are merely feeble attempts at gaslighting as many gullible, low-information voters as he can by spreading falsehoods backed with erroneous assumptions while attacking his opponents and forcing people to ignore his rantings through the sheer boredom of his repetitive messaging.
Trump’s latest tweet is an offensive against Democrats that relies on the false premise that the opposition research — a hot topic again now that Trump has admitted that he would illegally take such information from hostile foreign powers without informing the FBI — conducted by British Intelligence agent Christopher Steele was initiated by Democrats rather than by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative Republican publication supporting other candidates during the GOP primary.
……If Republicans ever did that to the Democrats, there would be all hell to pay. It would be a scandal like no other!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 16, 2019
For a thorough and detailed explanation of just how far President Trump’s claims about the origins and nature of the Steel Dossier are from the truth, it’s wise to turn to the work of Seth Abramson, a law professor at the University of New Hampshire who has researched the counter-intelligence investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign extensively.
Abramson posted a lengthy history of the opposition research into candidate Trump on Twitter today that demonstrates in great detail that Trump’s accusations against the Democrats are simply convenient lies designed to cover up his own crimes.
Here are the first few posts in Abramson’s thread from which you can then click through to Twitter to follow up and read the entire exhaustively researched thread.
1/ From the moment he decided to run for POTUS in 2016—November 2012, per his own advisors—Trump told about as many lies about his foreign entanglements as he'd continue to do as president: that is, thousands. Each potentially hid the fact he'd been compromised by foreign powers.
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) June 16, 2019
3/ The right-wing entity that did the opposition research that'd eventually come to the country's notice—involving a company called Fusion GPS—was the WASHINGTON FREE BEACON, which engaged Fusion GPS to conduct such research with funding from a right-wing anti-Trump billionaire.
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) June 16, 2019
5/ That's right: REPUBLICANS paid Fusion GPS to find dirt on Trump, and almost immediately a Fusion GPS contractor from the United Kingdom (allowed by law because he's a contractor) found intel in Russia about the Kremlin possibly having kompromat (blackmail material) on Trump.
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) June 16, 2019
With a thread that extends to 40 posts and a postscript, there’s lots more to read on Abramson’s Twitter page — none of it supporting anything that the president asserts.
The second part of President Trump’s tweet, however, brings us back into alternative universe territory.
Trump’s claim that “if Republicans ever did that to the Democrats, there would be all hell to pay. It would be a scandal like no other!” requires that its readers both ignore all of the attempts that the Republican party undertook during the Obama administration to undermine his agenda with endless investigations into Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s email server and overlook the fact that the vast majority of the Steele Dossier’s conclusions have been proven true as the Mueller report results demonstrate.
The president’s shameless political misinformation campaign is designed to reassure and retain his true believers and shield them from the truth that is slowly being revealed by the multiple investigations into Trump’s and his associates’ conduct that continue to this day.
Left unchallenged, Trump’s tweets could eventually transform our reality into the alternate universe of lies and deception that his mind conjures.
He must be removed from office as soon as possible.
Follow Vinnie Longobardo on Twitter.
