BLITZ by David Horowitz

Author:David Horowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Humanix Books

“Blasé About Truth Telling”

A less fevered view would recognize that most politicians routinely exaggerate their achievements. Moreover, on his election, Trump faced an unprecedented open revolt by the opposition party. Democrats made it clear they regarded Trump’s election as illegitimate, and that they planned to resist, obstruct, and sabotage his presidency at every turn. They openly contemplated impeachment before he even entered the Oval Office. Seventy Democrat representatives boycotted his inauguration. On his first full day in office, he was confronted by the largest demonstration in American history, organized by the Soros-funded Resistance, led by anti-American leftists and featuring the slogan “Not My President.” During a profane speech at the Women’s March, the day after Trump’s inauguration, onetime pop star Madonna infamously said, “Yes, I’m outraged. Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.”

Hearing constant threats from the progressives—resistance, obstruction, impeachment, and fantasies of violence—Trump decided to assert his legitimacy as the duly elected president. One of the ways he did so was to exaggerate the size of his crowd of inaugural supporters. He knew that 63 million people voted for him and that he had garnered a resounding 304 electoral college votes to Clinton’s 277. Whatever prompted him to exaggerate, it was as far from a supposed desire to “assert power over truth itself,” than Pluto is from planet Earth.

Without any sense of irony, Kakutani constructs the following picture of the president that 63 million Americans elected: “If a novelist had concocted a villain like Trump—a larger-than-life, over-the-top avatar of narcissism, mendacity, ignorance, prejudice, boorishness, demagoguery, and tyrannical impulses (not to mention someone who consumes as many as a dozen Diet Cokes a day)—she or he would likely be accused of extreme contrivance and implausibility.”180 Or perhaps of derangement triggered by irrational hate.

Kakutani then wonders how this ludicrous caricature could receive the support of so many Americans. Her answer: It is unlikely that he “would have gained such popular support were portions of the public not somehow blasé about truth telling.”181 Or perhaps just skeptical of “truth telling” by anti-Trumpers like Kakutani and her colleagues at the New York Times.

How intense is their hatred? For Kakutani, Trump is the “extreme, bizarro-world apotheosis of many of the broader, intertwined attitudes undermining truth today, from the merging of news and politics with entertainment, to the toxic polarization that’s overtaken American politics, to the growing populist contempt for expertise.”182 In other words, in Kakutani’s view, Trump is the alpha and omega of everything that is wrong with America’s political culture, which has caused the death of truth, and laid the groundwork for a totalitarian regime like that of Hitler Germany or Stalinist Russia.

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