This weekend a sitting president claimed, with no evidence other than the tangentially-related blathering of a conspiracy website, that the prior president—you know, the one who may or may not even be a real American citizen, according to the same conspiracy narratives he had previously given voice to—had illegally wiretapped his house because reasons. This follows on the heels of a pattern of false claims that persisted throughout the campaign and, now, the new presidency, a pattern well-documented by the fossil records of 2015 and 2016 as well as today’s more modern journalistic efforts.
If your takeaway from this weekend of incendiary false claims from Mar-a-Lago is to get The Official Vapors because Sen. Bernie Sanders opined afterwards that the sitting president was in fact a "shameless" liar, and then use that rude statement to moan woefully about the "sorry state of political discourse," you may have your priorities in the same place as certain pundit-centric elements of our national freaking press.
Put another way: One side of the aisle is accusing the president straight-up of lying. In 2017, that's just another day in politics.
This is the state of our political discourse right now. Political norms — like, don't accuse the president of the United States of lying without evidence, or don't accuse the former president of the United States of wiretapping your phones without evidence — have been eviscerated.
Take that, American discourse: you’ve been both-sides’d. It may be outrageous to accuse a past president of wiretapping your house based on nothing but your own imagination, but it’s equally outrageous to point out that it’s obviously and completely untrue.
Left completely unmentioned here: The ample evidence of Donald Trump lying. About crowd sizes. About his own past statements. About other people's past statements. About dozens upon dozens of things, all documented by the fact-checkers, all written down for easy review. Yes, that's right, we're going to have an official newspaper punditry speech about the sorry state of calling someone a liar, while brushing aside both the demonstrable pattern and the ramifications of the man’s lies. Both sides!
Democrats are blocking Trump in historic ways, like stalling committee hearings for key Cabinet posts or threatening to filibuster his Supreme Court nominee.
There is nothing historic about the delays of the confirmation hearings that just took place. As you will note, each of the nominees has been confirmed. Some of the hearings were held without the input of the Office of Government Ethics, because Republicans couldn't be bothered to wait. Several were confirmed without disclosures and other paperwork that were considered "historically" routine, until this year. And the notion of filibustering a Supreme Court nominee as alarming, even with no note of the “historic” curiosity of the Republican Party declaring that the last sitting president would be prevented from doing his constitutionally mandated duty of filling vacant Supreme Court seats during the last entire year of his term.
It was not a filibustering of any specific nominee, but a blanket refusal to allow any nominee to be considered regardless of qualification, until and unless the other party regained White House control. That seems either outrageously insincere or evidence that our pundit quite literally started paying attention to the state of our national discourse only within the last few weeks, perhaps after being discovered in a melting Canadian glacier and thawed out in the Washington Post lunchroom.
Since becoming president, [Trump has] tweeted several eyebrow-raising claims about widespread voter fraud or potentially earth-shattering wiretapping of his phones. He's refused to provide any evidence to back up those claims, and he and the White House are demanding that Congress investigate.
This is not how presidents are supposed to act, say Democrats.
No: This is not how presidents are supposed to act, say all normally functioning human beings who give a damn about our status as a functioning democracy. This is not a he-said, she-said sort of thing; we do not ‘both sides ‘ the issue of whether a president of the United States can falsely claim "millions" of "illegal" votes against him to make himself feel better or can suppose that his predecessor was mastermind of in illegal and unconstitutional law enforcement plot against him because he’s in a weekend pique. A sitting president disseminating, without evidence, sensational propaganda is not something that ought to be responded to by noting that his opponents take issue with these mannerisms.
We categorically know the voter fraud claim to be false, for example; there is no more evidence of "millions" of illegal voters swamping our polling places as there is evidence that the Washington Monument is made of cheddar. We can check; we can confirm. So that would be something that we can objectively point to as a lie.
You could see how, for example, a sitting United States senator would be quite comfortable pointing out such an obviously untrue statement as a lie. You could see why, for example, a paid pundit writing for a major newspaper might find such false claims by a national leader, any national leader, to be really damn alarming, and/or destructive to the republic, and/or at least as damaging to the cherished state of our discourse as, say, the eyebrow-raising decorum breach of pointing out that it’s not true.
Or we can just fuck it, and burrow snugly into the both sides veneer of false objectivity that is neither objective nor even rational. We do not need our national press institutions to whimper over whether or not calling someone a liar is worse than telling the public a lie. Such a column requires no so-called political expertise at all. It could be outsourced to a neighbor child, if you could find one willing to buy the sheer amorality of the premise.
But wait—here's the real reason Sen. Bernie Sanders is being undiplomatic by pointing out that Donald J. Trump exhibits a pattern of toxic public lying. Finally, we get to the point.
Here's the problem with using the “L” word in politics, though. To say someone's lying suggests that you know they don't believe what they're saying.
It's possible Trump believes the allegations he's making, which seem to have surfaced on a conservative news site one of his top aides used to manage.
WELL THERE WE GO. That's right: the man “seems to” have read something similar off of an internet web site. Oh, and then embellished with additional details himself. Oh, and then announced it out as national fact in a series of furious tweets, apparently without checking with any of his staff or making even the slightest queries as to whether the Thing He Read On The Internet Then Reinvented To Sound Even More Inflammatory was the slightest bit true, even though as leader of the nation he has literally hundreds of persons he could quickly call to verify or debunk the matter.
Indeed, it may be incorrect to call the sitting president a liar, because he may in fact be mentally ill. He may be out of his gourd. He may, in fact, be paranoid, or hallucinating, or on some cocktail of legal or illegal drugs that makes him believe things that are provably untrue. He may be illiterate. He may be a conspiracy-minded cultist. He may have the mind of a toddler. Any of these things may be true, and Sen. Bernie Sanders has done our discourse a great disservice by not contemplating each of the possibilities equally.
The current president may believe there were millions of invisible Americans voting against him, or that his inauguration crowds consisted of hundreds of thousands of people more than any of the television cameras captured, but—and this is what he sent his press secretary to argue, in the days afterwards—those persons were all rendered all but invisible due to the camera angles chosen by every single camera covering the event. He may believe that Barack Obama has wiretapped his bedroom or toilet, based on nothing more than his own imagined theories, and who are we to say that he is lying if in fact he is instead a paranoid, mentally unstable wreck of a person who can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction? Should we not give him that benefit of the doubt, rather than simply assuming he is telling falsehoods for his own personal gain?
Perhaps Donald Trump will next proclaim that ISIS is being secretly assisted in America by notable cartoon figure and cereal pitchman Tony the Tiger—and we will get stuffy columns in the Washington Post proclaiming that we cannot strictly determine that Trump is lying about the pencil-drawn terrorist mastermind, because Donald Trump may believe it to be true.
All right, fine. So we now have a new contender for most substance-free pile of anti-punditry to, for the moment, grace our national discourse, and it comes in the form of an earnest chastising of those who would call Donald Trump a "liar" when he peddles provably false or demonstrably self-invented claims when our fellow lawmakers could just as easily and far more charitably presume the man is not dishonest, but is simply batshit freaking insane.
It certainly seems like we are not going to survive the next few years with our democracy intact. But at least the discourse will be proper, as the press slowly evaporates in favor of White House-approved conspiracy theories and each of our "historic" checks and balances against corruption and crookedness in government get tossed aside one by one. At least we will be properly framing the debate.
The president and his party may or may not be lying when they pronounce provably untrue things—but at least we will not be protected from the outrage of somebody suggesting that out loud.