It's Still News When the President Wages a 40-Minute Assault on Reality
The avalanche of dishonesty from Donald Trump at a briefing Monday evening came to a crescendo with his talk of pre-existing conditions.
By Jack Holmes
Aug 11, 2020
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a335726...nl21062488
It's still worth remarking on when the President of the United States appears in public to unleash an avalanche of lies, particularly during a pandemic and an encroaching economic cataclysm.
We should mention up front that it's a good thing that the incident that caused the Secret Service to temporarily remove the president from the briefing Monday evening did not turn out to be a major threat. We also won't count Trump's claim that the person shot by law enforcement outside the White House grounds was "armed" as one of his false ones—things were happening fast, and besides, there was enough to go around here without it.
The president lied about mail-in ballots in Virginia, about Russian interference in the coming election, about foreign countries messing with mail-in ballots, about mail-in voting in New York, about whether the novel coronavirus spread in China, about tariffs, about how testing creates cases (again), about the stockpile of ventilators he inherited, about how the Obama administration "spied" on him.
The chance to spout the last one was served up by a good friend from OAN, the network for people who think Fox News is insufficiently loyal to the president (a group which sometimes includes the president), who began her query—which she called an "opinion" question—by essentially asking the president whether it was difficult to be so victimized by very nasty people. This kind of Dear Leader vaudeville has become commonplace in the American republic.
But the real peach arrived in a discussion of pre-existing conditions. Guaranteed protection thereof is one of the most popular parts of the Affordable Care Act. The Trump administration filed a brief with the Supreme Court in June calling for the ACA to be destroyed.
This puts Trump—not to mention a bunch of Republican state attorneys general—on the side of removing protections for pre-existing conditions. However, Republicans also discovered this polls very badly, so despite what they are actually doing, they continually say they are committed to protecting coverage.
This culminated with Josh Hawley, then actively suing to destroy Obamacare as Missouri attorney general, pushing out ads during his Senate campaign touting his support for pre-existing conditions coverage. This was completely shameless, but Hawley is now a United States senator. The problem will not go away if and when Trump does.
Despite all this, the Affordable Care Act remains the law of the land, so insurance companies still can't deny you coverage on the basis you have a pre-existing condition. And yet, as part of his flurry of performative action this weekend, the president issued an executive order mandating that insurance companies cover pre-existing conditions. A reporter asked about this at the briefing Monday.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a335726...nl21062488
Trump claims that when he falsely claimed preexisting conditions aren't already required to be covered by law, he simply meant that there has never been an executive order reaffirming that.
Another one for the Dumbest Moments in White House History file. I said, as you said—I said... What the president seems to be saying is that he didn't say pre-existing condition coverage had never been done before, he said it's never been done by executive order before. This is probably not what he was trying to get away with saying at the time, but it is technically true, and also completely meaningless.
It's already been done by an act of Congress. Which makes it more permanent and durable, because it's been enacted as the law of the land in the manner proscribed by the Constitution of this country. Executive orders, as Barack Obama came to find out, were not just constitutionally suspect—and a serious expansion of executive power—but ultimately flimsy if your party loses the next election.
Also, nixing the individual mandate did not "end Obamacare." While it was catastrophic in terms of the law's functioning—and shady, in that the Republican Congress stuffed its repeal into a tax cut for rich people and corporations—it did not somehow nullify the rest of the bill.
The mandate was indeed unpopular, and we should just have Medicare For All, but it was in principle no different from a car insurance mandate, and in practice served to get enough healthy people in the risk pools that insurance for less healthy people was more affordable.
But none of this is the point. Trump said the quiet part out loud soon enough after repeating himself endlessly on the individual mandate stuff. "And pre-existing conditions, the Republicans are 100-percent there. And I'll be issuing at some point in the not-too-distant future a statement on that." That is to say, the executive order was a PR ploy to tell people the president and his party care about protecting coverage despite—gestures broadly—what they've actually done. This is not a small thing. People's lives are on the line, but it's just another opportunity for a con. We all look like Atlantic City contractors to this guy.
And then, finally, there was a history lesson.
REPORTER: If 160,000 people had died on Obama's watch, would you have called for his resignation?
TRUMP: No
[Trump called for Obama to resign over ebola, which didn't kill anyone in the US!]
Well, here's a different history lesson to start: in 2014, Trump called for Obama's resignation should it turn out that one doctor, "who so recklessly flew into New York from West Africa, has Ebola." He did not.
One person died in the United States from Ebola, and they contracted it in Liberia. 160,000 Americans are dead from COVID-19, and we're supposed to believe that Trump, who used to call for Obama's resignation like he calls for another Diet Coke, would have backed him to keep his job?
Come on, man. He's backing himself to keep the job now, which is why he makes up wild alternate realities where millions of Americans could have died if not for his travel ban on China. The ban had so many exceptions that tens of thousands of people made the trip anyway, and the virus was already here by that time.
To buttress his meelyuns and meelyuns claim, however, we got that history lesson from Dr. Trump, PhD. We've now gone well beyond the president's constant insistence that the Spanish Flu outbreak happened in 1917. (It was 1918, into 1919.) Now the outbreak ended World War II in 1945.
Believe it or not, this is entirely related to the president's seemingly more purposeful lies. It's all of a piece with his complete rejection of the concept of objective reality. The truth is whatever you can get enough people to believe, so what actually happened is not relevant.
This is what's undergirding his claim that as many as 2 million people would have died without his travel ban, but also his declaration that the Spanish Flu ended the Second World War. There's no need to learn history, or even acknowledge reality as it is right now. What's the difference? Just say anything.
The avalanche of dishonesty from Donald Trump at a briefing Monday evening came to a crescendo with his talk of pre-existing conditions.
By Jack Holmes
Aug 11, 2020
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a335726...nl21062488
It's still worth remarking on when the President of the United States appears in public to unleash an avalanche of lies, particularly during a pandemic and an encroaching economic cataclysm.
We should mention up front that it's a good thing that the incident that caused the Secret Service to temporarily remove the president from the briefing Monday evening did not turn out to be a major threat. We also won't count Trump's claim that the person shot by law enforcement outside the White House grounds was "armed" as one of his false ones—things were happening fast, and besides, there was enough to go around here without it.
The president lied about mail-in ballots in Virginia, about Russian interference in the coming election, about foreign countries messing with mail-in ballots, about mail-in voting in New York, about whether the novel coronavirus spread in China, about tariffs, about how testing creates cases (again), about the stockpile of ventilators he inherited, about how the Obama administration "spied" on him.
The chance to spout the last one was served up by a good friend from OAN, the network for people who think Fox News is insufficiently loyal to the president (a group which sometimes includes the president), who began her query—which she called an "opinion" question—by essentially asking the president whether it was difficult to be so victimized by very nasty people. This kind of Dear Leader vaudeville has become commonplace in the American republic.
But the real peach arrived in a discussion of pre-existing conditions. Guaranteed protection thereof is one of the most popular parts of the Affordable Care Act. The Trump administration filed a brief with the Supreme Court in June calling for the ACA to be destroyed.
This puts Trump—not to mention a bunch of Republican state attorneys general—on the side of removing protections for pre-existing conditions. However, Republicans also discovered this polls very badly, so despite what they are actually doing, they continually say they are committed to protecting coverage.
This culminated with Josh Hawley, then actively suing to destroy Obamacare as Missouri attorney general, pushing out ads during his Senate campaign touting his support for pre-existing conditions coverage. This was completely shameless, but Hawley is now a United States senator. The problem will not go away if and when Trump does.
Despite all this, the Affordable Care Act remains the law of the land, so insurance companies still can't deny you coverage on the basis you have a pre-existing condition. And yet, as part of his flurry of performative action this weekend, the president issued an executive order mandating that insurance companies cover pre-existing conditions. A reporter asked about this at the briefing Monday.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a335726...nl21062488
Trump claims that when he falsely claimed preexisting conditions aren't already required to be covered by law, he simply meant that there has never been an executive order reaffirming that.
Another one for the Dumbest Moments in White House History file. I said, as you said—I said... What the president seems to be saying is that he didn't say pre-existing condition coverage had never been done before, he said it's never been done by executive order before. This is probably not what he was trying to get away with saying at the time, but it is technically true, and also completely meaningless.
It's already been done by an act of Congress. Which makes it more permanent and durable, because it's been enacted as the law of the land in the manner proscribed by the Constitution of this country. Executive orders, as Barack Obama came to find out, were not just constitutionally suspect—and a serious expansion of executive power—but ultimately flimsy if your party loses the next election.
Also, nixing the individual mandate did not "end Obamacare." While it was catastrophic in terms of the law's functioning—and shady, in that the Republican Congress stuffed its repeal into a tax cut for rich people and corporations—it did not somehow nullify the rest of the bill.
The mandate was indeed unpopular, and we should just have Medicare For All, but it was in principle no different from a car insurance mandate, and in practice served to get enough healthy people in the risk pools that insurance for less healthy people was more affordable.
But none of this is the point. Trump said the quiet part out loud soon enough after repeating himself endlessly on the individual mandate stuff. "And pre-existing conditions, the Republicans are 100-percent there. And I'll be issuing at some point in the not-too-distant future a statement on that." That is to say, the executive order was a PR ploy to tell people the president and his party care about protecting coverage despite—gestures broadly—what they've actually done. This is not a small thing. People's lives are on the line, but it's just another opportunity for a con. We all look like Atlantic City contractors to this guy.
And then, finally, there was a history lesson.
REPORTER: If 160,000 people had died on Obama's watch, would you have called for his resignation?
TRUMP: No
[Trump called for Obama to resign over ebola, which didn't kill anyone in the US!]
Well, here's a different history lesson to start: in 2014, Trump called for Obama's resignation should it turn out that one doctor, "who so recklessly flew into New York from West Africa, has Ebola." He did not.
One person died in the United States from Ebola, and they contracted it in Liberia. 160,000 Americans are dead from COVID-19, and we're supposed to believe that Trump, who used to call for Obama's resignation like he calls for another Diet Coke, would have backed him to keep his job?
Come on, man. He's backing himself to keep the job now, which is why he makes up wild alternate realities where millions of Americans could have died if not for his travel ban on China. The ban had so many exceptions that tens of thousands of people made the trip anyway, and the virus was already here by that time.
To buttress his meelyuns and meelyuns claim, however, we got that history lesson from Dr. Trump, PhD. We've now gone well beyond the president's constant insistence that the Spanish Flu outbreak happened in 1917. (It was 1918, into 1919.) Now the outbreak ended World War II in 1945.
Believe it or not, this is entirely related to the president's seemingly more purposeful lies. It's all of a piece with his complete rejection of the concept of objective reality. The truth is whatever you can get enough people to believe, so what actually happened is not relevant.
This is what's undergirding his claim that as many as 2 million people would have died without his travel ban, but also his declaration that the Spanish Flu ended the Second World War. There's no need to learn history, or even acknowledge reality as it is right now. What's the difference? Just say anything.
