Trump ‘Is as Much the Gullible Tool of Liars as He Is the Liar in Chief’: LA Times Publishes Part II in Scathing Series

‘He Puts the Nation in Danger by Undermining the Role of Truth in Public Discourse’

The Editorial Board of the LA Times has published Part II in its four-part series on President Donald Trump and his lies. “Why Trump Lies,” Monday’s offering, continues after Sunday’s scathing “Our Dishonest President.”

As in Sunday’s edition, the editors do not hold back. In beautiful prose they blast the nascent president as “as much the gullible tool of liars as he is the liar in chief.”

It does not end there.

The Times calls Trump dangerous: “he puts the nation in danger by undermining the role of truth in public discourse and policymaking, as well as the notion of truth being verifiable and mutually intelligible.”

It does not end there, either.

He is dangerous. His choice of falsehoods and his method of spewing them — often in tweets, as if he spent his days and nights glued to his bedside radio and was periodically set off by some drivel uttered by a talk show host who repeated something he’d read on some fringe blog — are a clue to Trump’s thought processes and perhaps his lack of agency.

Trump is called a demagogue…

In the months ahead, Trump will bring his embrace of alternative facts on the nation’s behalf into talks with China, North Korea or any number of powers with interests counter to ours and that constitute an existential threat. At home, Trump now becomes the embodiment of the populist notion (with roots planted at least as deeply in the Left as the Right) that verifiable truth is merely a concept invented by fusty intellectuals, and that popular leaders can provide some equally valid substitute. We’ve seen people like that before, and we have a name for them: demagogues.

…And a stooge:

He has made himself the stooge, the mark, for every crazy blogger, political quack, racial theorist, foreign leader or nutcase peddling a story that he might repackage to his benefit as a tweet, an appointment, an executive order or a policy. He is a stranger to the concept of verification, the insistence on evidence and the standards of proof that apply in a courtroom or a medical lab — and that ought to prevail in the White House.

The piece is a quick read and worth every minute.

EARLIER:

Scathing LA Times Editorial Series Launches with “Our Dishonest President”

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