In the wake of the November 8 election, the Trump transition has generated a barrage of ridiculousness at breakneck speed. Blunders, backpedaling, conflicts of interest — not unexpected exactly, considering what happened during the campaign, but still difficult to keep track of without sustaining some permanent retinal injury.
That’s why we’re launching Orange Alert, a new, bi-weekly-ish column pointing out total flip-flops, dog whistles, dubious social media declarations and outright lies on the part of Trump and his team — and how they conflict with reality.
What he said:
“You’d be in jail.” (Trump during an Oct. 9 debate with Hillary Clinton on what would happen if he were president.)
What he says now:
“I want to move forward, I don’t want to move back. And I don’t want to hurt the Clintons. I really don’t.” (Trump to the New York Times, Nov. 22.)
What he said:
“The hedge-fund guys didn’t build this country. These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky… They make a fortune, they pay no tax… It’s the wrong thing. The hedge-funds guys are getting away with murder.” (Trump on CBS’s Face the Nation, Aug. 2015.)
What he did:
Picked hedge-fund guy Steven Mnuchin to run the Treasury Department.
What he said:
“I’m not going to let Wall Street get away with murder. Wall Street has caused tremendous problems for us… I don’t care about the Wall Street guys.” (Jan. 9, 2016 campaign speech in Ottumwa, Iowa.)
What he did:
Picked ultimate Wall Street guy, billionaire bankruptcy champ Wilbur Ross, to run the Commerce Department.
What he said:
“Somebody has to repeal and replace Obamacare. And they have to do it fast and not just talk about it.” (Trump at Iowa Freedom Summit, Jan. 2015.)
What he said after talking to Obama:
“Either Obamacare will be amended, or repealed and replaced.” (From an interview published Nov. 11 in the Wall Street Journal, in which said he was open to keeping some of Obamacare’s provisions.)
What he did:
Picked the most ardent foe of Obamacare in Congress, Georgia’s Tom Price, to be his Secretary of Health and Human Services.
What he said:
“It is indeed time to drain the swamp in Washington.” (Oct. 18 rally in Colorado, part of his pledge to rid the system of political insiders.)
What he did:
Picked Elaine Chao for Secretary of Transportation (Secretary of Labor under George W. Bush, married to Mitch McConnell, Senate majority leader) and a whole slew of other Washingtonian types who are anything but outsiders — including his vice president.
What he said:
“Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag — if they do, there must be consequences — perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!” (Trump tweet on Nov. 29.)
Why that’s flat-out wrong:
Texas v. Johnson and United States v. Eichman — 1989 and 1990 Supreme Court rulings affirming the right to burn the flag as a form of “symbolic speech” protected by the, um, First Amendment .
What he said:
“In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” (Trump tweet on Nov. 27.)
Why that’s a flat-out lie:
As proven by PolitiFact, there is absolutely no basis for that claim. Trump apparently came to that “millions” number via some guy on Twitter.
Yes, we saved the worst for last — because the big problem with this is that it legitimizes simply making shit up to convince people that your opinion is right. It’s emblematic of our growing cultural epidemic of not being able to decipher conclusions arrived at via evidence and reason and those desperately clung to despite lack of evidence because they confirm an already existing bias.
That M.O. is growing rampant at a time when our survival depends on an understanding that there’s an objective set of facts that governs our world — gravity exists, the earth is round, a large flux of CO2 emissions is changing our atmosphere, voter suppression is a much bigger problem than voter fraud.
This has been going on for years now, but the president-elect’s apparent refusal to acknowledge the difference between reality and bias-confirming claims means we’re poised to enter a foggy, not-so-brave new world where you can see there’s a tree in your path, but if the guy in the driver’s seat doesn’t feel like believing it’s there, he’ll plow straight into it, killing everyone in the vehicle.
And that’s horrifying.
This article appears in Dec 1-8, 2016.