I don’t know about you, but I want to turn away from the incessant flow of sewage from Donald Trump’s tweeter hole. Hard to tell how much of it is a distraction from the ever-tightening pincers of the Mueller investigation with its grab-bag of plea bargainers and how much it’s just Himself ad-libbing his Reality TV® persona. Whatever the case, I desperately want to ignore whatever’s contained in his most recent spray of Twitterrhea. All of it is, of course, crap. This stinks up the daily discourse and reduces the amount of time media (and the rest of us) spend on matters of real importance.
Trouble is, it’s impossible not to pay attention because sometimes the spew is a threat of annihilating a foreign nation, an omen of another human-unfriendly policy headed our way, a deeper plunge into the delusionary fantasy he thinks is the real world, or some racist trope deployed against a foe. And often it’s disinformation that he either concocts by himself or takes from the latest claim of the increasingly fact-free Lou Dobbs or one of Sean Hannity’s twisted versions of what’s going on.
All those reasons not to pay attention aside, it is worth noting that Trump—who was relentless in his efforts to push the white supremacist line to otherize Barack Obama by challenging the fact he was born an American and in the process hooked himself to some of the most despicable disinformants on the planet—has now attempted to outdo himself in the conspiracy theory club.
Late Friday, as tweeted by Daniel Dale, the Toronto Star’s Washington correspondent, Trump added a deatherism bookend to his birtherism. He’s challenged the study that shows 1,427 more Puerto Ricans died than would have been the case if Hurricane María never happened.
He tells us he doesn’t believe it, and suggests some sinister jiggering of the calculations. He claims the numbers of dead can’t be nearly so high because that many weren’t tallied immediately after the hurricane, implying that these don’t count. It’s a pathetic display, one deeply disrespectful of Puerto Ricans who lost kin and friends in that disaster since many of them died because of the Trump regime’s incompetence and indifference. Washington’s response to María in Puerto Rico made the “heckuva job” response to Katrina look like the Marshall Plan.
Here’s Daniel Dale setting fire to Trump’s manure: