“If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it.”
It’s a famous quote, usually attributed to Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels, but the fascinating thing about it is that there is a second part to the quote that is rarely repeated.
“If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.”
Ladies and gentlemen, Mister Donald Trump.
If there is one thing we know about Trump, it’s that he has spent his entire life desperately trying to impress his late father. He has said many times that Daddy Fred said there were only two types of people in the world — killers and losers. Killers are people who would do whatever it takes — no matter how unethical — to win. Losers wouldn’t.
Ever since he was prepubescent and Fred called him the grouchy little homo, li’l Don has followed that instruction to the letter. Be a killer or be a loser. That’s where many of his most prolific lies have come from.
It has a terrible shock to him to lose the 2020 election to Joe Biden, just as it has been a terrible shock to him that so much of the American public has little use for him. So he compensates for that by calling the polls fake news and by saying he didn’t really lose the election.
Those of us not bamboozled by Trump tend to see him as a master liar who is basically evil. Throw in a teaspoon of paranoia and half a cup of dementia and it’s a Shakespearian tragedy.
Except that maybe it isn’t.
For all the times Trump has bragged about being a very stable genius, much of the talk about him from people who have known him say he isn’t all that bright. He claimed to have graduated first in his class in college, but actual records say he was 364th out of 366 graduates that year.
That’s not necessarily horrible. John McCain was at the bottom of his class at the U.S. Naval Academy, but he turned out all right. Of course, Fred Trump wasn’t his father.
Remember, Trump has been almost fanatical in making sure his transcripts and test scores are kept secret, and plenty of people who have briefed him on important issues as president have said he doesn’t seem to understand what they are telling him.
There have been plenty of presidents who weren’t all that intellectual, but most of them understood how much it mattered to have people advising them who knew the issues. Trump seems to want everyone advising him to be lower on the intelligence scale than he is, which is how we get a cabinet little better than gypsies, tramps and thieves.
Really, Mike? Quoting Cher? And Goebbels in the same post?
In the end, there really isn’t any doubt that almost everything Trump says is a lie. The only real question is whether they are lies with malice or lies out of mental illness/stupidity.
Which brings us back to Goebbels.
“If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.”