The Boy Who Chirps Wolf

By Calvin Hill

There is a narrative among the open-minded that if @realdonaldtrump would just stop Tweeting, the nation could get back to the business of governing. Why are they more concerned with the excessive Tweeting than they are about the incessant lying? It should be very clear to those open-minded and those who have been paying attention, that Donald Trump seems to have a serious psychological aversion to the truth. There appears to be nothing he will not lie about, from easy to recognize crowd sizes to independent employment numbers, plus anything and everything in between.

He was given information that a member of his campaign staff, General Michael Flynn was compromised by Russian influence weeks before he claimed that no one in his campaign was in touch with Russia. It also turns out that his choice for Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, and one of his top advisors, son-in-law Jared Kushner, met with the Russian ambassador to the US at Trump Tower.

He has asked his generals to come up with a plan to defeat ISIS after having campaigned that he had a plan to defeat ISIS – but would not reveal it for someone else to get credit. I imagine letting more innocent people and soldiers die was just the price we had to pay until he got elected. Without providing any evidence, he has accused the former President, Barack Obama, of wiretapping his phones at Trump Tower, asserted that 3 to 5 million people all voted, illegally, for Hillary Clinton, and repeatedly claimed that positive monthly job reports, under the Obama administration, were phony.

Trump has lied about saving thousands of jobs that were already committed to staying in the US before the election. And he has even lied about being his own spokesperson to promote ‘Donald Trump’s’ successful business acumen and prowess with attracting the ladies. But perhaps his biggest lie(s) that sent lie detector needles into a frenzy from coast to coast was that Barack Obama was not born in the United States of America. He claimed to have sent investigators to Hawaii and told Americans, “You can’t believe what they are finding!” However, unless his “investigators” operated under the cloak of invisibility, they must have found nothing to substantiate his charge. His failure to produce any investigators that he hired and sent to Hawaii appears to be just another lie.  After Obama produced his long form birth certificate, Trump bragged that only he was responsible for the president’s disclosure. Almost immediately following his fit of braggadocio, Trump then accused the birth certificate of being a fake – again without providing any evidence of, or from, any source. Having revealed his obsessive idiocy regarding Obama’s place of birth, the next target of his many prevarications was Obama’s tenure at Columbia University in New York. For Trump, it was not enough that Obama show his birth certificate, he now wanted the President of the United States to provide his college transcripts because, according to Trump, nobody at Columbia saw or knew “this guy.”

When confronted with losing the popular vote, Trump revealed one of his more contradictory absurdities. At first, he correctly states that the nationwide popular vote is/was not the goal – 270 electoral votes was the goal. He said he would have campaigned differently, and still won, if he had to win the popular vote. Finally, the ego obsessive loss of the popular vote led to the lie that 3 to 5 million people all voted, illegally, for Hillary Clinton, which lost him the popular vote. That led to another lie that his Electoral College victory was a landslide and one of the largest ever.

Trump’s lack of veracity should surprise no one. The pile of lawsuits alleging he has not paid for products delivered and labor provided is astounding. His defense is that maybe they didn’t get paid because they didn’t do a good job. Yet he never mentions that he requested they do it over or returned any defective merchandise. This is how he has done business. And to Trump, the presidency is just another business acquisition.

Today, one of Trump’s sons thanked Rachel Maddow for revealing that Donald Trump’s 2005 tax return showed that he paid approximately $38 million in taxes on just over $150 million of earnings. But, beware the Ides of March. Trump supporters should know that this president wants to eliminate a tax provision, the ALTERNATIVE MINIMUM TAX, that would reduce that $38 million to just over $5 million on the same income – less than 4 percent in taxes. The Maddow reveal was also useful because it exposed the need to know how the money was made, not just the taxes paid. And in light of his son’s 2008 admission that lots of Russian investment was coming into the Trump Organization, The Donald’s repeated claim that he has “Nothing to do with Russia,” the multitude of undisclosed, clandestine meetings and possible collusion between Kremlin operatives and the Trump campaign, Trump’s extremely troubling refusal to say anything at all negative about Vladimir Putin, and in fact praises him, the vigorous inspection of the tax schedules of Donald J. Trump from 2008 to the present, is of paramount importance. Whatever you think of Rachel Maddow’s style or the result of her show regarding the limited 2005 tax return, she has assembled a clear and precise series of shows connecting enough dots to show that Rex Tillerson, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Wilbur Ross, very possibly Jared Kushner and Jeff Sessions, along with Trump himself, form a very formidable Russian Dream Team.

And if the US Congress and the Fourth Estate do not take this Russian hold on Donald Trump more seriously than debating whether his wolf chirping Tweets  should be taken literally or figuratively, the signature song of the choir at future White House celebrations will be ONWARD KREMLIN SOLDIERS.