A very limited dip into the well of lies
From the Trump MTP Interview

NBC has been getting a lot of heat for its Meet the Press interview with former president Trump on Sunday, where Trump continued to double down on the lies he has spread on the 2020 election—and on his other potentially criminal activity. 

I did not watch the whole interview. Life is too short, and already too filled with unpleasant experiences, to voluntarily jump into that mudhole. However, two items did catch my attention. 

First was the outright, bald-face lie that Trump told about Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who recorded the phone call where the former president pressured the SOS to come up with fake results (“I just want to find 11,780 votes”) in order to overturn the Georgia presidential results. 

In the MTP interview, Trump said: “That was a phone call made in front of, I guess seven or eight lawyers. Brad Raffensperger, the head – who, by the way, last week said I didn’t do anything wrong; he said, ‘That was a negotiation.’ Brad Raffensperger, who I was dealing with, I appreciate that he said that. But he said last week, I didn’t do anything wrong.” 

The CNN fact check on that statement duly noted that there is no record of Raffensperger saying any such thing. But that is irrelevant: for Trump, the important thing is to muddy the waters and plant the claim that he was exonerated. Now, his followers can repeat the lie—they will fill social media and conservative news programs with the statement that Raffensperger said something that he didn’t say. And it won’t matter that they have no proof he said it. It has become a Trump talking point, and so, gospel. 

 

It was also illuminating listening to the former president bob and weave on the question of who convinced him the 2020 election was rigged. The answer? Some people, but mostly just himself. 

 

“I was listening to different people, and when I added it all up, the election was rigged,” Trump told [NBC’s] Kristen Welker in the interview, again pushing the false claim as he seeks the 2024 Republican nomination for president.

“You know who I listen to? Myself. I saw what happened,” Trump said.

Of course, we know who he should've listened to. His Attorney General. His Vice President. The election officials of the states in question, who were mostly Republican. His campaign officials. The Department of Homeland Security experts who oversaw election security. The audits. The recounts. The 60+ court cases where it was established that fraud had not happened. (In the one case where the Trump campaign prevailed, fraud was not charged; it was simply a matter of deadlines for mail-in ballots.)

That's not who listened to. He listened to a cherry-picked group of lawyers who were telling him what he wanted to hear. Which was, basically, that he could not lose, and if he did lose, it had to be because it was rigged.

The “I listened to some people/I listened to myself” is another transparent attempt to muddy the waters and evade responsibility for his actions. And it is very much in line with the MAGA philosophy overall: believe what you want to believe, don’t pay attention to so-called “facts,” or “experts.” After all, who are they to tell us what is true and what is false?

What is reality, anyway? 

We can only hope that a judge and jury will decide that yes, there are knowable facts. That it matters what election officials and those in charge of election security say about the election. But the bigger problem is that too many Americans have bought into this mindset—that we can ignore the facts and just bend reality to our will. If we say it, it’s so. 

It's a crazy way to live. But not that uncommon these days. And I am forced to agree that the mainstream media is part of the problem. I think the new host of MTP, Kristen Welker, should get a chance to redeem herself after this spectacle. But she’s got some work to do.