They even suck at lying

One of us is incredibly stupid

This administration is incompetent at everything, including lying. They have told lies in the past few weeks that are either disproved at the time of uttering or within seconds thereafter. Some of their lies are imminently disprovable by just waiting for events to transpire. It is difficult to discern whether they are really just this lazy and mentally impaired, or if they believe the American people are.

He lied about Iran’s nuclear weapons program status. Despite the testimony by his own hand-selected, ironically titled, totally incompetent, but unflinchingly loyal Director of National Intelligence (DNI) citing that Iran was still years away from being able to produce their own nuclear weapons, Trump claimed that they were within days of being able to launch. He either got a stern talking-to by his buddy Bibi, or he decided the made-for-TV show starring his favorite character needed to change the story. His lie is asinine because the truth is already out there and about to be validated from dozens of sources more reliable than the president and his lying loyalists. The majority of intelligence agencies across the globe are convinced that Iran not only was years away from producing a weapon, they seemed to have little interest before this incident in pursuing that path in earnest. They continued to refine uranium as part of their threat, but also to support their domestic energy and medical applications. Over the coming weeks it will be revealed that the only people who felt Iran posed a threat were Netanyahu and Trump, both of whom decided they needed that to be true to support their broader narratives.

After justifying an unlawful act of war with their lies, releasing the new generation of bunker-buster bombs in potential war crimes, and truth-twitting about it the whole time, they then lied about obliterating Iran’s uranium enrichment and storage facilities. The president began claiming immediate success even before a bombing damage assessment (BDA) could be completed. He seems to think that if the bombers hit their targets, the mission must have been a success, but this is not how military operations work. Each mission has a set of specific objectives that will be used in the after-attack assessments to determine whether it was a success or not. Exciting video footage of 30,000-pound bombs leveling parts of a mountain are not among the success criteria to be assessed. Their “obliterated” story is another ill-advised lie because the evidence will emerge through the natural course of events, and it will refute everything that the president and his propagandists have been claiming. The fact that the international agencies that measure atomic residue have stated no changes in measurements since the bombing already tells us that the 400kg of enriched uranium was likely not destroyed in the attack. Intelligence reports are indicating that Iran used the ongoing attacks by Israel combined with the broadcast truth-twits from Trump to proactively move their caches of uranium out of the targeted facilities.

Even while the fallout of his unconstitutional order to bomb another sovereign nation without the consent of Congress was playing out in the media, the president lied about a cease fire between Israel and Iran. Again, he truth-twitted that a permanent ceasefire had been negotiated (implying he was involved, which of course he was not), along with some more begging for a Nobel Peace Prize. His truth-twit was still being re-twitted to lots of twits while both Israel and Iran continued to bomb each other well past the alleged agreed-upon deadline in the fictitious ceasefire proclamation. This lie didn’t even get fully spread to his followers before it was disproven. It seems that any person with a working brain in their skull would know not to proclaim a non-existent agreement with a deadline within hours to a large-ish audience knowing that the truth would emerge by that self-stated deadline. It is mind-numbing to consider the level of stupidity necessary to make this type of repeated mistake. Of course he is more interested in getting credit and accolades than in telling the truth, but doesn’t seem to realize he gets neither credit nor accolades when his claims are proven to be lies each and every time. There is no upside, only downside to his behavior. It is strange that nobody seems to be able to teach him this simple truism.

They lied about a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment leak of the preliminary report on the Iran attacks. The preliminary assessment indicated that any setback to the Iranian nuclear weapons program due to the U.S. bombing would likely be measured in months not years. Press Secretary Leavitt claimed that it was somehow both untrue and also a serious leak. Of course, this is nonsense since if the leaked information was untrue, then it was not a leak at all but someone else telling lies. It is tough when the lie contradicts itself, that is a whole new level of poor performance fabrication, but if anyone can do it, the propagandists in this regime can. It should come as no surprise that this press secretary has issued self-contradicting lies before, also about alleged leaks that were simultaneously untrue and also serious leaks requiring aggressive investigation and prosecution. She likes to lie, a lot. Once again this whole approach is idiotic because the DIA reports do get shared with Congress and parts do ultimately make it into the public domain. So, what is the benefit of lying about something that will become public in short order? If the report happened to corroborate the president’s version of events, would they be as upset about it being “leaked”?

They are lying about people arrested by ICE. The president and the Department of Homeland Security, Pee Wee German, and Lyin’ Leavitt are all out there in the media claiming that all of the detainees are violent criminals. ICE and Homeland Security are unwilling to have those claims tested under oath in a court of law, or even in an immigration court. Instead, they simply say it is so, and expect all American citizens to accept their word as gospel on this subject. Unfortunately, many stories are emerging that prove that some (actually most) of the detainees are not criminals at all. In fact, many of them are not residing in the U.S. illegally either. The lazy and incompetent (and probably not federally employed) ICE agents are rounding up brown people where they are known to be, aggressively arresting them, throwing them in inhumane cells, sometimes sending them to their home country, sometimes sending them to 3rd party countries, but always without due process. They are defying court orders to avoid being forced to present their cases to impartial judges and juries. They are lying as if these detained people don’t have families or friends. ICE is lying as if social media does not exist. In this case, they can’t even get their lies out before the truth has circulated around the social media universe 3 times. As a result, they look even dumber than normal claiming that passive migrants resisted arrest, or U.S. Representatives assaulted ICE agents, or that 10,000 peaceful protesters turned a city of 16 million residents to ruin in 48 hours. Only the weakest of minds could accept lies this crappy.

They are lying about ICE personnel and whether they are federal employees. The administration, especially the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), represents all of their agents as federal officers but allows them to remain unidentified in the field. They wear masks over their faces and do not present badges with identification numbers or name tags. They dress in plain clothes, don military vests with terms like “ICE”, “Police”, or “DHS” stenciled on them, and are heavily armed. The administration claims that fear of doxxing is justification for their secrecy in terms of identity. The same administration that lauds supporters who dox judges, politicians, and activists who act counter to the president’s wishes. Regardless of their weak reasoning, the reality is more likely that many of these ICE agents are not, in fact, federal employees, but instead members of militia groups that have been engaged to enact the president’s racist divisive agenda against migrant populations. Based on video evidence there seem to be many agents that have never received proper training on arrest procedures, especially use of force policies. The decision to allow anonymity among alleged legally authorized officers of the government is a decision to shield them from accountability for their acts of incompetence and criminality. The representation that these agents are legally operating according to the laws of the U.S. under direction from the federal government is a lie. The identities of some of the worst among these horrible “agents” will be revealed, likely soon, and the piss poor lies will once again be exposed.

They lied about the number of migrants who are violent criminals. The campaign team convinced their supporters that there were tens of millions of violent criminal aliens residing in our country. They used individual stories of a few violent criminals who happened to be migrants in the country illegally to paint a picture. Now that they are in office, and expected to rid our nation of those tens of millions of evil people, they cannot. They cannot because they lied about the number in the first place. There are not millions of violent migrant criminals. There are not even hundreds. They cannot change their story now, so they must continue their lies. The president and his racism czar, Pee Wee German, are now claiming that all immigrants are subject to deportation at the president’s discretion. Given that we are a nation of immigrants and all of us except Native Americans are the products of immigration, we are all subject to deportation in Stephen Miller’s warped world. Once again, the lie is so blatant and filled with built-in accountability, that any rational being might wonder who would be so desperate to rely on such a fabrication, and why.

They lied about the number of migrants that entered the country illegally under the Biden administration. This is the great lie that begets a lot of the other immigration lies. The reality is that Biden deported more migrants than Trump during his first term, and that just chaps his ass to no end. On top of that, Obama deported more migrants in each of his 2 terms than Trump did in his first. The right loves to claim that tens of millions of “illegals” streamed across the border during Biden’s term. There is no evidence presented with their claims, just podcaster bullshit and performative pounding on desks. The facts show that there were more encounters during the first years of Biden’s term, along with more asylum applications and work visa requests, all representing backlogs from the illegal and inhumane family-separation and incarceration policies of Trump. But there were also more deportations during Biden’s early years too. The reality is that Biden focused on fixing the asylum application process, moving it upstream into the home countries of our highest volumes of applicants (e.g., Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans) and increasing the severity of penalties for migrants who enter illegally. Trump demanded that MAGpublicans kill an immigration reform bill that was heavily slanted toward their priorities just so Trump could continue to campaign on the topic. He lied about wanting to secure the border, he just wanted to win his election.

They lied about Biden’s “open border” policies. Part of the claim of millions of violent criminals streaming into our country is that the southern border was “wide open”. That is a lie that was disproven before it was uttered. The evidence shows that encounters of migrants spiked when Biden returned to office. That could only be true if the border was patrolled and CBP agents were maintaining the border territory. The evidence shows that many of those who did not qualify for asylum protections were deported, resulting in some of the highest deportation volumes in history. In the end, crossings dropped to levels lower than they were under Trump while deportations were much higher than they were under Trump. MAGA wants to paint a different picture because they can’t accept the fact that immigration policies worked better under Democrats than under any Republican president. All that said, serious reform is required in order to move this topic from being a campaign attack point and source of innumerable lies, to being a formal policy that supports the American economy and the people’s interests.

They lied about the 2020 election results. The Trump team still promotes this lie, even calling for a Special Investigator to reopen this ego-driven fantasy. These lies were so obviously false that they resulted in numerous civil defamation suits against Trump’s most egregious lie spreaders: Giuliani, Fox News, The Pillow Guy. The Trump 2020 campaign team spread their lies fast and furious claiming hijacked voting machines, Chinese software hacks, corrupt local ballot counters, and mysterious ballot dumps. Each of their claims was adjudicated in expedited court cases due to the serious implications of those claims. In 60 different cases, the campaign team won a single ruling that did not affect the outcome of that precinct. They failed to produce any evidence whatsoever in the vast majority of their cases, earning an immediate dismissal for each. In the few cases where they presented evidence, that proof was found to be falsified or misinterpreted or just plain dumb, and resulted in dismissals. Those lies were perhaps necessary to salve Trump’s ego after his loss but were stupid nonetheless because every attorney on his team knew that those claims would face the scrutiny of judges and defense attorneys before any results would be amended. The campaign team seemed to believe that as long as there were claims in process they could convince Congress to invalidate the whole election, which is another level of stupid wishful thinking. This lie continues to metastasize into corrupt judges and courts, corporate media manipulations, and deep state actors, but it hasn’t gotten any more intelligent or valid, just weirder and dumber.

He lied about tariffs. Trump claims a bunch of falsehoods about tariffs that have never been true. He claims that tariffs made our nation wealthy in the past when in reality they were one of the factors cited as a precursor to the Great Depression. He claims that foreign nations pay the tariffs, not the American consumer, which ignores the literal definition of the word tariff. He claims that tariffs can replace income and corporate taxes, but he doesn’t seem to comprehend the difference between billions (order of magnitude for tariffs collected annually) and trillions (order of magnitude for income taxes collected annually). He claims that tariffs will drive American productivity, but retaliatory tariffs would reduce global demand for American products resulting in layoffs and lowering gross domestic product (i.e., lower national productivity). He claims that tariffs are not inflationary but doesn’t seem to know that tariffs add to product costs, increasing current prices, which is the definition of inflation. He claims that tariffs will motivate corporations to bring more jobs back to the U.S. but he seems to lack the knowledge of how corporations make these decisions based on significantly lower labor costs, foreign tax incentives, and foreign market access laws (e.g., to access the Chinese market, a corporation must operate through a China-based entity). All of these lies are dead on arrival with no time lag required. What is just as telling is that the big bullshit budget bill has no additional tariff revenue included, just the alleged offset in taxes for the wealthy with no corresponding tariff increase. These lies prove that this administration has no plan for balancing the budget or reducing our national debt, just a bunch of fabricated narratives that lazy-minded people accept without question.

They are lying about the big bullshit budget bill. The original promise for this bill was that it would lower taxes for everyone, cut government costs far more than the reduction of those taxes, allegedly through elimination of waste, fraud, and abuse found by Elon Musk and DOGE. When people starting doing basic math and asking questions the administration added more lies about not cutting Medicaid, Medicare, or Social Security. The details continue to ooze out of the reconciliation process between the House and Senate versions but it is already obvious that everything the administration is saying about this bill is a lie. The bill increases both short term deficits and the national debt over the 10-year planning window. The bill does reduce taxes, mostly for the wealthy and corporations with no additional revenue increases. The president and his “economists” predict that the boost in corporate productivity resulting from the bill will increase tax collections, even at the lower tax rates, sufficiently to draw down our annual deficits and pay down the national debt. This is a lie. They have not shared a projection of how much productivity increase would be required to cover that gap, but it is orders of magnitude higher than any annual productivity increase ever experienced in the history of the world. A simplistic back-of-the-napkin calculation implied a nearly 300% increase in productivity would be needed to generate the additional corporate tax revenues necessary, every year. If we somehow assume that the corporations would share their dramatically improved profits with their employees, the productivity threshold would drop as those much wealthier employees would pay more in taxes too, but corporations do not have a history of such benevolence to guide us to this assumption. The MAGpublicans have also lied about the intention of many parts of the big bullshit budget bill. They have jammed it full of non-budgetary items to sneak some of the president’s most abhorrent policies into existence. Fortunately the Byrd bath process in the Senate is finding and removing many of these items, at least for the purposes of voting on a reconciliation bill. The bottom line is that there is nothing honest about this bill and all of it is immediately reviewable by anybody. There are lots of experts parsing the thousands of pages and revealing the lies being propagated by the president, MAGpublicans, and the right-wing echo chamber. Being proven to be a degenerate liar does not seem to hold the shame for these folks that it holds for normal human beings. Cultist says “Huh?”

So, the president and his administration promote weak lies like these for one of two reasons, or perhaps both reasons: 1) they are lazy and not very smart, and 2) they believe the American public, especially their supporters, are lazy and not very smart. If these crappy falsehoods are the result of the president’s lack of imagination and creativity, that is a problem. The fact that his go-to move is to lie to the people he was elected to represent reveals everything we need to know about his defective personality. This is not new news, of course. It is ironic that he would likely perform better presenting the truth, but he seems completely incapable of any form of sincerity or honesty. He is truly psychopathic.

If the president is actually a 3-D-chess-playing savant and he’s decided that the American public lacks the intellect to detect his misdirections, then somebody needs to pass him a note. Almost all of us are well aware of his lies, mainly because they are so stupid and obvious. Some of his cult-like followers choose to base their version of reality on the lies that Trump tells. They actually are in that category of too dumb to figure it out. But that is less than 20% of the population at this point. The real answer is likely a combination of the administration’s lazy ineptitude and their belief that everyone else is lazier and less intelligent than the president. This explanation is consistent with all of their initial lies as well as their feigned shock of reporters and politicians calling them out on their lies.

As an aside, the right-wing MAGA cultists and their podcasting performative pinheads often take offense to being called stupid. There is a meme that goes around every few weeks framing the right-winger question “Why do leftists think that MAGA supporters are stupid?” The answers in the meme focus on the many criminal acts and unethical actions taken by the president before, during, and after his presidential terms. But the more honest answer may be the admission that so many of them are willing to accept low-quality, uninspired, easily-refuted lies from their dear leader as their own definition of “the real world” instead of simply looking up and seeing it for themselves. That behavior has been on display by his cultists since 2016 and shows no signs of changing, other than the percentage of people willing to switch off their brains for this president. The fact that any human being chooses to relegate their higher brain functions to anyone else, much less a lazy liar, is evidence of lower-than-average intelligence.

This image is from our visit to Fort Abraham Lincoln in the summer of 2022 and it reminds me that just like this sentry station, we must remain vigilant and on the lookout for the lies of this regime, we must counter those lies with the truth, and we must continue to fire our truths at their lies until they are defeated.