You are being played

Goings on in Washington often seem like a farce, but especially lately. Never before have we been asked to believe so many falsehoods right in front of our eyes. The president seems to believe that if you appeal to people’s prejudices, the facts simply won’t matter. It remains to be seen whether he’s right.

One recent example was the sideshow over the Philadelphia Eagles’ appearance at the White House. This is usually a mutually congratulatory event as Super Bowl winners get a presidential nod, and the president gets to say, “Hey look, winners, me,” hoping voters will see an association (yes, I was cynical long before Trump).

But last month, Trump announced abruptly that the Eagles had been uninvited. They weren’t welcome, allegedly because they wouldn’t stand for the national anthem.

The fact is, exactly zero of the Eagles players knelt during the national anthem last year. Whatever you think of the controversy, it had little to do with this team. What was really going on was the majority of the team had no desire to be associated with this particular White House. This is happening more and more, not only with athletes, but with artists and other public figures. Trump may have won the Electoral College, but his open bigotry is still unpopular among the public.

So Trump cancelled the normal invitation to avoid the embarrassment of having a photo op with only a handful of players. And, he offered an obviously fake reason.

Perhaps that’s par for the course for Trump, but it gets worse from there. Fox News got into the game, showing an image purportedly of Eagles players kneeling during the anthem that was actually of some players praying before a game. (Fox later issued a rare retraction).

But Trump continued the farce. Saying Eagles fans could still celebrate, he went forward with a public event, even bringing along the Marine band and Army chorus. This event, supposedly to celebrate the Eagles’ accomplishment, turned into a superpatriotic stage show, with the president bungling an attempt to mime God Bless America.

Looking through the crowd, you couldn’t find an Eagles jersey in sight. One reporter interviewed several participants and not one could name the winning quarterback.

Though the White House tried to blame the Eagles, saying they had abandoned their fans, their fans were not to be seen. The “crowd” at the staged event turned out to be White House staffers, summoned there to pretend they cared about football or patriotism.

Trump attempting to distract his supporters from his own failures with appeals to patriotism is not new. But this is so transparent, one has to wonder if those supporters know they’re being used or simply don’t care.

But it isn’t just trivial things he lies about. Take the recent meeting with the North Korean dictator. The administration gave that country’s dictator, Kim Jong Un, an audience, status he’s long wanted, and got nothing in return. Videos shown at the event were so strange, reporters thought they were North Korean propaganda. It turned out they were produced by the White House.

Trump, and much of the media, trumpeted the event, announcing a historic agreement for the secretive North Korean government to fully denuclearize. This is a promise they’ve made and broken several times before, and there is exactly nothing verifiable in the document. The administration has long criticized supposed weakness in the deal with Iran to prevent their development of nuclear weapons, negotiated by the Obama administration and several other international leaders, but gave North Korea concessions for nothing in return but a promise.

And it’s a promise quickly broken, as the North Korean government appears to already be escalating its nuclear program.

The lie didn’t end there. Trump claimed to have been approached by thousands of parents of Korean war veterans during the campaign who wanted their children’s remains returned. The problem is, anyone who is a parent of a Korean war soldier would likely be in excess of 100 years old, so the idea that thousands of them came to him is ludicrous.

But Trump claims that more than 200 have already been returned. This is false and almost no one in the media has called him on the lie.

If President Obama had made such a false claim, he’d immediately have been accused of disrespecting the troops. But Trump insults the military on such a regular basis that we’ve almost become used to it.

So, the question for his supporters is, do you really not know, or do you not care?