Could Trump Stop Himself From Lying If He Wanted To?

Why would Trump be jealous?

Trump has told intimates that he doesn't want to fire Defense Secretary James Mattis because Mattis "looks" like a general. Appearances mean a lot to the imbecile illegitimate "president." I've heard from someone in the office of one of Trump's cosmetic surgeons that Trump is painfully aware of how ugly he's become over the years no matter how many nips and tucks he gets. That's why he absolutely loathes Justin Trudeau, who is both handsome and, unlike the lard-assed couch potato Trump has turned into, vigorous. On Wednesday evening at a private fundraiser for a right-wing goon, Josh Hawley, running for Claire McCaskill's Senate seat, Trump boasted to the enraptured donors that he just made up shit when he was negotiating with Trudeau.

Someone made a tape and leaked it and Trump told the morons in the room that he insisted that the U.S. had a trade deficit with Canada, but had no idea if he was lying or telling the truth. This is what the crazy orange pig said to the prime minister of our closest and most important ally:

"Trudeau came to see me. He’s a good guy. Justin. He said 'No, no, we have no trade deficit with you, we have none. Donald, please,'" Trump said. "Nice guy, good looking guy, comes in-- 'Donald we have no trade deficit.'"

"I said, 'Wrong Justin, you do.' I didn’t even know... I had no idea. I just said 'You’re wrong.' You know why? Because we’re so stupid... And I thought they were smart. I said, ‘You’re wrong Justin.'"

"He said, 'Nope we have no trade deficit.' I said, 'Well in that case I feel differently,' I said, 'but I don’t believe it.' I sent one of our guys out, his guy, my guy, they went out, I said 'Check because I can’t believe it.'"

"'Well sir you’re actually right. We have no deficit but that doesn’t include energy and timber… And when you do we lose $17 billion a year.' It’s incredible."

Trump was lying again-- this time to the donors. The U.S. actually has a trade surplus with Canada, not a deficit. How can anyone deal with this raging psychopathic liar? Jeet Heer pointed out in the New Republic that Señor Trumpanzee is worse than a liar and that his clownish perforce for the Hawley donors "reveals the depth of his pathology." Heer asserts that Señor T is "a full-fledged bullshit artist. There’s a difference: Lying involves conscious deception, whereas bullshitting is a more insidious attempt to blur the lines between truth and falsehood."

“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth,” the philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote in his 2005 book On Bullshit. “Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all bets are off.... He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.”

In 2015, I drew on Frankfurt’s work to argue that Trump, then in the early stages of his presidential campaign, had all the characteristics of a bullshit artist: He not only frequently made false statements, but was indifferent to whether they were false or not. In doing so, he undermines the very idea that the truth is relevant or even knowable.

There are several layers of untruth here. There’s the initial statement to Trudeau about the trade deficit, which Trump knowingly makes up (“I had no idea”). But Trump lied again when he said his lie turned out to be true. As The Post notes, “The Office of the United States Trade Representative says the United States has a trade surplus with Canada. It reports that in 2016, the United States exported $12.5 billion more in goods and services than it imported from Canada, leading to a trade surplus, not a deficit.”

In telling his story, Trump implied that his gut instincts are so good that he can, while talking to another world leader, invent facts that turn out to be true. That was perhaps the biggest fiction of all in his speech, and it is squarely aimed at his hardcore Republican supporters. It’s hardly an accident he said this at fundraiser.

After The Post broke the story, Trump responded with a tweet on Thursday morning that reiterated the lie about America has a trade deficit with Canada:

Before he became president, Trump’s bullshitting could be dismissed as a campaign tactic. That he continues to bullshit as president indicates that it’s more than a strategy; it’s a pathology. Trump doesn’t know how not to bullshit. This may stem from his career in real estate, where a certain poetic license is the norm, or perhaps he learned it from his father (a real estate developer himself). And now that he’s in politics, it means he’s always in campaign mode and never really governing.

Frankfurt’s paradigm is helpful in explaining why refuting Trump’s fibs on a case-by-case basis, as fact-checkers exhaustively do, has its limits. Trump is waging a more holistic war against a shared, objective set of facts, and it requires an equally holistic counterattack.

Trump’s bullshitting is integral to his success in fomenting tribalism and polarization. He has created a political movement where his followers will believe whatever he says, no matter how patently false, and disbelieve whatever his opponents say, no matter how objectively true. Only 20 percent of Trump supporters, for instance, believe that his lawyer Michael Cohen paid hush money to the porn star Stormy Daniels, even though that is an undisputed fact: Cohen has admitted as much.

Trump’s continued B.S. as president illustrates how he’s willing to sacrifice broader policy objectives for his short-term political needs. It’s also turning the president into an laughingstock globally. “The Donald and I, we are winning and winning in the polls,” Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said in a speech last June. “We are winning so much, we are winning, we are winning like we have never won before. We are winning in the polls. We are, we are. Not the fake polls. Not the fake polls. They’re the ones we’re not winning in. We’re winning in the real polls. You know, the online polls. They are so easy to win. I know that. Did you know that? I kind of know that. They are so easy to win. I have this Russian guy. Believe me it’s true, it’s true.”

Trudeau and Turnbull know they can ignore Trump’s bullshit. Probably every world leader does. The fact that the words of an American president now count for so little, and are so easily laughed at, is nothing to brag about.

And A Little Message From Facebook Tonight

When will the Mercers go to Prison?

This is by Paul Grewal, Facebook VP and Deputy General Counsel

We are suspending Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), including their political data analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, from Facebook. Given the public prominence of this organization, we want to take a moment to explain how we came to this decision and why.

We Maintain Strict Standards and Policies

Protecting people’s information is at the heart of everything we do, and we require the same from people who operate apps on Facebook. In 2015, we learned that a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge named Dr. Aleksandr Kogan lied to us and violated our Platform Policies by passing data from an app that was using Facebook Login to SCL/Cambridge Analytica, a firm that does political, government and military work around the globe. He also passed that data to Christopher Wylie of Eunoia Technologies, Inc.

Like all app developers, Kogan requested and gained access to information from people after they chose to download his app. His app, “thisisyourdigitallife,” offered a personality prediction, and billed itself on Facebook as “a research app used by psychologists.” Approximately 270,000 people downloaded the app. In so doing, they gave their consent for Kogan to access information such as the city they set on their profile, or content they had liked, as well as more limited information about friends who had their privacy settings set to allow it.

Although Kogan gained access to this information in a legitimate way and through the proper channels that governed all developers on Facebook at that time, he did not subsequently abide by our rules. By passing information on to a third party, including SCL/Cambridge Analytica and Christopher Wylie of Eunoia Technologies, he violated our platform policies. When we learned of this violation in 2015, we removed his app from Facebook and demanded certifications from Kogan and all parties he had given data to that the information had been destroyed. Cambridge Analytica, Kogan and Wylie all certified to us that they destroyed the data.

Breaking the Rules Leads to Suspension

Several days ago, we received reports that, contrary to the certifications we were given, not all data was deleted. We are moving aggressively to determine the accuracy of these claims. If true, this is another unacceptable violation of trust and the commitments they made. We are suspending SCL/Cambridge Analytica, Wylie and Kogan from Facebook, pending further information.

We are committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people’s information. We will take whatever steps are required to see that this happens. We will take legal action if necessary to hold them responsible and accountable for any unlawful behavior.

How Things Have Changed

We are constantly working to improve the safety and experience of everyone on Facebook. In the past five years, we have made significant improvements in our ability to detect and prevent violations by app developers. Now all apps requesting detailed user information go through our App Review process, which requires developers to justify the data they’re looking to collect and how they’re going to use it-- before they’re allowed to even ask people for it.

In 2014, after hearing feedback from the Facebook community, we made an update to ensure that each person decides what information they want to share about themselves, including their friend list. This is just one of the many ways we give people the tools to control their experience. Before you decide to use an app, you can review the permissions the developer is requesting and choose which information to share. You can manage or revoke those permissions at any time.

On an ongoing basis, we also do a variety of manual and automated checks to ensure compliance with our policies and a positive experience for users. These include steps such as random audits of existing apps along with the regular and proactive monitoring of the fastest growing apps.

We enforce our policies in a variety of ways-- from working with developers to fix the problem, to suspending developers from our platform, to pursuing litigation.