'The Anatomy of a Lie,' NYT reconstruct of 'Trump's failed 77-day effort to subvert democracy and overturn the 2020 election'

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Originally published at: 'The Anatomy of a Lie,' NYT reconstruct of 'Trump's failed 77-day effort to subvert democracy and overturn the 2020 election' | Boing Boing

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Who gets to play Trump when this gets turned into a script and is produced by Netflix or Amazon as a miniseries?

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I’ll only read it there’s a picture of Maggie Haberman weeping as he flies away on Marine One.

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Take note of the names of all the enablers, henchmen, toadies, cowards, opportunists, fascists, white supremacists, and conspiracy nuts who helped him and continue to pose a danger to liberal democracy.

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He’ll play himself. He needs the paycheck.

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Please let it be Brendan Gleeson again! His Trump portrayal in The Comey Rule was masterfully sleazy, slimy, and uncomfortable.

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He’s been doing this for way longer than 77 days.
He said it was voter fraud that led to him losing the popular vote to Hillary.
He planted that seed a long time ago but decided to harvest during those 77 days.

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I don’t suppose the NYT acknowledges their own role in all this? Legitimizing Trump by reporting on his constant illegal activity as though it’s unusual-but-okay? Publishing fascist editorials in the name of both-sideism? Constantly pushing white neocon and neolib narratives that contributed to his rise and continued popularity? Hmmm? Looking at you, NYT? No? Didn’t think so.

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It’s satisfying that the NYT can finally use words like “lie”— earlier in the administration, of necessity, they had to use “misstatement”, “mischaracterization”, etc. (at worst, they’d say things like “without factual basis”.)

And I think they were correct in their editorial decision: if they started using the L-Word in 2017, they would never have stopped, he told so many lies. He lied about the number of people at his own inauguration and never stopped. The word would have lost its meaning, its (appropriate) shock value.

Were we reading the same NYT? They did the best they could given his abnormal malignant sociopathy. That was Trump’s genius. If NYT had daily acknowledged his abnormality, NYT’s tone would quickly have become indistinguishable from that of the shrieking gullet of Newsmax/OANN (uh, except NYT would be the factual news source alongside the fictitious Newsmax/OANN organ of propaganda). But no, NYT did not “legitimize” Trump.

Actually, they did call out Trump’s illegal/immoral activity, often and loudly. You seem to be propagating your own bizarre false dichotomy: where if the NYT isn’t perfectly emulating The Daily Kos, then it is nothing more than Der Stürmer.

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I’m reading this one:

That’s a bizarre false dichotomy. There’s miles and miles of middle ground between calling out Trump’s illegal/immoral activity, as press is supposed to do, and OANN.

I stand by what a wrote. You can scarequote it all you like.

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The lesson Trump has learned is that there will always be another lying and craven supporter to con when you wear out your welcome with the current batch.

It’s lying and craven assholes all the way down.

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So disinformation is okay if it means not using a particular word too much? Style guides over fulfiling their constitutional roll is preferable?

They did not. They normalized it.

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Why? What necessity?

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There was no necessity, just cowardice disguised as high-minded propriety.

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Both sides, Loki! BOTH SIDES have very fine people… /s

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Can you imagine if a Democratic President had tried this bullshit?

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I think it is far too soon to describe this as a failed effort to subvert democracy. It hasn’t been stopped yet, it is still there, and it is still lurking.

We need to put an end to this, and we haven’t done so yet. I refer you to the words of the Honorable Representative Greene if you need further illumination on the subject. Of Ted Cruz, of basically anyone from Congress with a -R behind their name.

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And even way, way before all that, by publishing false narratives that he was a successful businessman, basically setting the table for his opinions to “mean something.”

Fat chance, though.

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I just keep saying the same thing-- before you start saying the election was stolen, you first have to show it was won by a guy who had dismal approval ratings for his entire time in office, and who was trailing Biden by double digits the whole campaign.

If it’s “unheard of” for a president to win without taking Florida and Ohio, then it’s doubly unheard of for an incompetent president to win under an economy that he completely ruined while huge numbers of his own party are coming out publicly against him.

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I think one reason they avoided using “lie” for so long is because that word assumes Trump’s state of mind when he said things that were provably untrue, something journalists usually strive to avoid. For example, it’s plausible that Trump is stupid and/or delusional enough to believe the claims he was making, so they stuck to words like “false” instead of “lie” since that’s an objective statement of fact.

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