Over the weekend, Donald Trump posted a video offering a black and white image of about 70 men gathered in a circle. A few seconds into the video, an explosion happens. The circle of people is no more. Trump said on Truth Social that they were terrorists and bragged: “Oops, there will be no attack by these Houthis. They will never sink our ships again.” The Houthi rebels say the latest U.S. strikes killed just two people. Americans would like to think that in such a dispute, it’s their own president who’s telling the truth.
Alas, we can’t do that these days. There’s a famous story I heard Zbigniew Brzezinski relate at a large conference in Washington as George W. Bush and his cronies warned us about Saddam Hussein and mushroom clouds. Back in 1962, a U.S. attaché to France went to see President Charles de Gaulle to tell him that the United States had photographic evidence that the Soviet Union had missiles in Cuba. The envoy had a folder with the evidence in question and began to slide it toward Monsieur President. De Gaulle pushed it away. I don’t need to see this, he said; if the president of the United States says it, that’s enough for me.
“Could you imagine,” Brzezinski asked his slack-jawed audience, “a head of state expressing that kind of confidence in this president?” Brzezinski, whom I had the good fortune of meeting and interviewing during the Iraq War, was plenty outraged at the prevarications of Bush & Co’s White House. Imagine what he’d be thinking today.
Trump’s approval rating is sliding, seemingly down into the low 40s. This is all before we price in the mayhem and disruption that his outlandish tariff scheme brings; it may be months from now before the effects of his decision to blow up the economy are fully felt.
But if you ask me, even 43 is high at this moment. Most of his policies are unpopular—it’s basically only on immigration that the public gives him reasonably high marks (which is depressing, yes, but that’s a reality we need to come to grips with if we want to turn it around). On the economy, inflation, the DOGE cuts, Russia-Ukraine, and more, he’s in the red. The American people are beginning to catch the distinct scent that they were conned.
What’s keeping him even at 43 percent? At this point, it’s the right-wing media that’s doing the heavy lifting. The disinformation bubble that surrounds and encases and protects him and spins everything he does positively and spins everything his opponents do as corrupt or treasonous—that dread machine is still running at peak capacity. And let’s be honest about how corrupt this corrupt Tilt-a-Whirl really is: If this was a Democratic president pulling these kind of schemes, this same media infrastructure would be apoplectic.
Your hair was probably about as on fire as mine was late last week when we learned that Trump skipped honoring the four American soldiers who died in Lithuania last month in a training accident and whose bodies were returned to Dover Air Base last Thursday. He was flying down to Florida to host (at one of his resorts) a golf tournament paid for by Saudi Arabia and to hold some fundraisers. This, right after tanking the economy with his tariff announcement, which flushed billions of dollars of hardworking people’s retirement savings down the drain.
That’s about five kinds of sick. Any decent American should be ashamed. Imagine Barack Obama had skipped the return of soldiers’ bodies to Dover for a round of golf. Fox would see to it that such an episode hounded him to his grave. But if Fox News reported on Trump doing this, I can’t find any evidence of it. My Google search turned up evidence of some Fox stories on the search for the soldiers, but nothing about Trump and the ceremony. I did read that the families had requested that no media be present. That was no doubt a disincentive for Trump to bother showing up—along with the Saudi lucre to be lapped up down in Florida.
Lies of omission, lies of commission, repeatedly endlessly, piled one on top of the other, recycled as necessary. Have you heard about Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s mansion in Florida? No? Well, sister, get your nose out of deep-state sheets like The New Republic and start reading some “real” news.
If you do, you’ll learn that the Ukrainian leader’s Florida manse, variously priced at anywhere from $11 million to $35 million, is one of just 15 homes he owns, to say nothing of his three planes, his $1.2 billion Swiss bank account, and his monthly income of $11 million.
Needless to say, there isn’t a scintilla of reliable documentation for any of this story. For sure, the guy isn’t poor. Zelenskiy was a big TV star, and I guess that makes you money even in Ukraine. But he’s no billionaire, and none of this nonsense is true. It’s an old rumor that resurfaces whenever it’s handy—such as last month, after Trump’s shameful berating of Zelenskiy in the Oval Office—to be reposted on thousands of Facebook pages as yet more proof, as if more were needed in that universe, of the moral bankruptcy and hypocrisy of anyone and everyone who gets under Dear Leader’s pasty skin.
Every accusation is a confession. They have to describe Trump’s foes as morally bankrupt because deep down, they know that that is Trump’s core flaw. He has no morals. They know it. They know that John Kelly told Jeff Goldberg the truth about Trump’s contempt for the dead who are buried at Arlington Cemetery. They know it was a national humiliation last week for Trump to skip Dover to profit from the presidency (and from the Saudis, no less) at his golf club.
They know he’s a moral disaster, which is exactly why they have to try to move heaven and earth and tell whatever lies are necessary to paint his opponents as moral disasters. Ascribe your hero’s flaws to his foes. It works.
And by the way: the Houthi strikes? Maybe Trump was telling the truth about that one case. I don’t know. We do know though that in general terms, of course, he is lying as always when he says things like the Houthis have been “decimated.” The New York Times reported over the weekend that, even after we’ve spent $200 million dropping bombs on the Houthis in the past three weeks, privately, Pentagon officials “have acknowledged that there has been only limited success in destroying the Houthis’ vast, largely underground arsenal of missiles, drones and launchers.”
Much of America, of course, will never know that truth. But they’ll see that video, probably many times. That’s what sustains Trump. Eventually, the facts of his incompetence will overwhelm even the vast propaganda network that defends him. I just hope the economy doesn’t have to collapse for that to happen.
