Oh, Sarah. Why make things so easy? Why not tell more convincing lies? Like today, Sarah Huckabee Sanders (daughter of Mike Huckabee, let us never forget that Sarah got her looks and her job because of her father) had to go out and tell a fully verifiable lie. A lie that could be easily disproven with official government figures.
So yes, Sarah did go there, and she did claim that Trump won the popular vote in the 2016 election. She claimed Trump “was elected by the overwhelming majority of 63 million Americans who came out and supported him and wanted to see his policies enacted”.
Trump got 62,955,202 votes. Clinton got 65,794,399 votes.
What Huckabee Sanders really means to say, and what is clearly heard by the dog whistle White supremacists, is that Trump got the “real American” votes. This is the dog whistle that Huckabee Sanders employs to gaslight America. That Trump’s votes were legitimate and that Clinton’s votes were illegitimate.
Why tell such a lie when other things are more important? Like the carnage in Pittsburgh, the attempted political assassination of a former president, and the execution of two people in what would have been a massacre in a black church. Why? It’s called deflection.
Deflection is what Trump was doing when confronted with the end results of his code words of support for white nationalists. It was Trump that said he was a nationalist. But, instead of owning up that he was responsible for the outcome of the aforementioned acts of political violence, Trump had to deflect and say that the reason he was campaigning without a hiatus for reflection on the violence he had wrought, was because his big Wall Street friend reopened the New York Stock Exchange the day following the September 11, 2001 attacks. In other words, rather than speaking truthfully that he was concerned that the emergent narrative placed blame squarely on his shoulders, he had to deflect and tell a provable lie. The NYSE did not open the day following the attacks. The NYSE reopened September 17th, 2001. Why did Trump lie?
Well, as with all pathologies, the lie had several layers. The main component was to deflect and say that he was simply following tradition. He was not, he was breaking tradition. Another component was to dress himself up in importance. Because being friends with the people running the NYSE makes him important. Then there is the lie within the lie. After the 9/11 attacks Trump claimed he had lost hundreds of friends in the attacks. Of course he has never once mentioned the name of a single friend of his that died and he was never seen at any of the thousands of funerals. But because that lie never caught up with him, what was a new lie going to do to him? In fact, he knew that it would do the opposite. Those that supported Trump got reinvigorated in their support because he confirmed to them that he is a decent, intelligent person. Of course he is neither.
But besides inflating himself, the purpose of these lies is to create a counter narrative. A narrative that fills the empty space that should instead be filled with a conversation about how Trump’s words have created the environment where individuals think it is ok to walk into a synagogue and indiscriminately start shooting people dead. This is what Trump has brought. This is the environment he has created through his dog whistles. By filling up the space with lies and innuendo about his foes, Trump essentially defuses the situation, and not in a good way.
Trump’s deflection always has a greater goal of creating further discord. Even after he says in a speech that anti-Semitism should be condemned, he immediately tweets that the press is the enemy of the people. Trump’s continued battle with the truth has no good ending. Particularly as it seems that either the state will succumb to his self-serving propaganda, or that at least a sizable portion of the population will fall victim to his mythos.