Watching the president speak to Congress, I’m struck by lie after lie after lie after lie that is scrolling across the teleprompter, into the president’s eye, and straight out of his mouth.
I struggled with how to discuss all the lies that just fell from those pursed little lips like drool from an infant’s mouth, and I realized that it just isn’t possible. I don’t have a staff of people who can furiously research every lie he tells and set it right. I’m just me. So since there is only one of me, I decided I should focus on just one lie.
Or, better yet, focus on the death of one truth, because isn’t that what a lie really is? The murder of a truth?
But what truth deserves my attention? With so many deaths in a single speech, it might be difficult to decide, but I found one right away, not even a full minute into his speech, and it is a murdered truth that sets the stage for all the other truths gunned down in his speech, and it is this one:
I am here tonight to deliver a message of unity and strength, and it is a message deeply delivered from my heart.
donald trump kicked off his campaign with the infamous “Mexican rapists” speech, got his biggest applause lines during the campaign promising to ban Muslims from our nation, spent his New Year’s Eve tweeting about “haters and losers” and finally (but clearly not definitively) spent a good portion of his address to Congress calling out crimes committed by “illegal immigrants”, using language universally understood to be divisive.
Only donald trump possesses the conceit to tell us he’s going to unite us just before he spends more than an hour dividing us, and then tell us that a speech written by someone else and then read off a teleprompter is “deeply delivered from the heart.”
And finally, trump cynically used the death of Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens to call on his widow during his speech to talk about how great trump’s failed raid in Yemen was.
Owens’ widow then received what was probably the longest ovation in the history of Congressional addresses, which trump then used to make about himself.
With a president like this, who needs ISIS?