The U.S. is living the fable of the emperor’s new clothes
If you’re going to lie, make it a good one. Meaning, put some effort into it. Make it convincing. Make sure the truth is not easily discoverable. Don’t just draw on a weather map with a Sharpie.
That’s apparently what Donald Trump or someone in his employ did last week to prove he was right all along in claiming that the state of Alabama lay in the path of Hurricane Dorian. He made this claim via Twitter Sunday morning, and it was so alarmingly wrong that the Birmingham office of the National Weather Service quickly tweeted an emphatic correction: “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian.”
A smart person would have said, “Oops, my bad” and moved on. Trump is not a smart person. Worse, he’s saddled with a congenital inability to admit when he’s wrong.
So what followed last Wednesday in the Oval Office was both predictable and pathetic. Trump trotted out a forecast map on which someone had used a black marker to extend the storm’s possible track across the southeastern tip of Alabama. Reporters asked if someone had drawn on the map. “I don’t know,” said Trump.
Later, he tried to further justify himself by trotting out raw computer model data indicating a low likelihood of Dorian striking Alabama. “I accept the Fake News apologies!” he crowed. But the data were from Aug. 28 — four days before Trump’s lie. By then, everyone knew Alabama wasn’t in danger — everyone but him.
That Trump lies is hardly breaking news. The Washington Post has tallied over 12,000 “false or misleading claims” since he took office. He’s lied about nations, public officials and presidents. Why not lie on a hurricane?
But it’s not the fact of the lie that matters. It’s the laziness of it.
The quality of a lie reveals the respect the liar has for those being lied to. You wouldn’t tell your boss you’re taking a day off because you’re needed to repair the International Space Station. No, you make it credible when you respect the person you’re lying to, when his or her good opinion matters.
Otherwise, you draw on a map with a Sharpie and call it a weather forecast.
Point being, we’re so used to this guy lying we forget to observe how truly bad at it he is. Meantime, the coterie of suck-ups and sycophants he calls an administration insists with a straight face that he’s telling the absolute truth and we’re somehow missing it. We are living the fable of the emperor’s new clothes, only it’s not a fable, and the emperor has nuclear weapons.
It gets worse. Roughly coincident with Trump’s whopper, there appeared on Medium an article by psychiatrists David M. Reiss and Seth D. Norrholm, renewing concern about the state of his mental health. “We definitely believe that based upon his observed behaviors, it is clinically indicated that Trump undergo a full and comprehensive neuropsychological evaluation,” they wrote.
So maybe he’s not just lazy. Maybe he’s also mentally impaired.
This alternative reveals the depths to which we’ve been brought by the bigotry of Republican voters who put him in office and the spinelessness of Republican (and Democratic) lawmakers who keep him there: We face two options, one of which is that the president of the United States simply does not respect the presidency or the people.
And incredibly, that’s the best-case scenario.