DownWithTyranny!: Big Day For Señor Trumpanzeer Yesterday

Good day for Trump yesterday? High ratings, certainly. Not ratings about quality-- rating as in eyeballs. But that's what he cares about. His UN thing (at the bottom of the post) was a doozy and that hour and a half long rambling vaudvillian press conference (above)... oy veh. Bragging, lies, bullshit...

It's hard to watch him, to listen to him. It makes me sad for our country, especially that thing at the UN, the best part of which being when the world's leaders just laughed at his campaign-mode crap. Seth Meyers was better:

Everybody who fact checks, fact checked his press conference. The one from NBC News highlighted eight lies:

1. Asked if he rejected a one-on-one meeting with the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Trump said, "Yeah, I did."

Nope. A press representative for the Canadian prime minister told NBC News in an email that no such meeting was requested.

2. Trump claimed President Barack Obama "wasn't big on picking judges. When I got here I said, 'How was this possible?' They just didn’t do it-- they got tired, they got complacent."

Here's what actually happened: Republicans blocked dozens of Obama's judicial nominees, including a Supreme Court pick. That left Trump with 103 court vacancies-- nearly twice the number Obama inherited in 2009.

3. Speaking of the American embassy in Jerusalem, Trump said, "We got (the embassy) open in four months, for less than $500,000, and the budget was over a billion dollars. So we saved, let’s say a billion dollars."

His numbers are off. Trump is describing modifications to an interim embassy, according to reports; the project is still ongoing and will cost more than half a million. The State Department has reportedly already awarded $21 million in contracts for the upcoming renovations.

4. The president said he was falsely accused of sexual misconduct by "four or five women" who made "stuff up about me."

Actually, 13 women have accused him of sexual misconduct in the past and provided corroborators or witnesses, according to a tally by the Washington Post, while The Guadian reports there are 20 accusers.

5. Asked why the White House did not order the FBI to investigate sexual misconduct allegations against Kavanaugh, Trump said: "There was nothing to investigate from at least one standpoint. They didn't know the location, they didn't know the time, they didn't know the year."

There are more details than Trump suggests. It's unclear which of the several accusers he is referring to, as the first woman to come forward, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, gave the year she says the alleged attack occurred, while another, Deborah Ramirez, provided the name of a college dormitory.

Ford says Kavanaugh attempted to sexually assault her during at a house party in a Maryland suburb in the summer of 1982. Ramirez said Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at the Yale University dormitory Lawrance Hall during the 1983-84 school year. Julie Swetnick accused Kavanaugh of getting women intoxicated so they could be attacked by groups of men between 1981 and 1983 at house parties in the Washington suburbs.

6. Trump disputed one of his own sexual misconduct accusations by saying it was unlikely to have occurred because he had a best-selling book out that same year.

Let's get a calendar. He is referring to the allegation from Jessica Leeds, who the New York Times reported said Trump touched her inappropriately in the early 1980s on a flight. Trump's campaign later put forward a witness who said he was on the flight and sitting across from Leeds. He disputed her account, and dated the flight to either 1980 or 1981. Trump's first book, "The Art of the Deal," was published several years later, in 1987.

7. "I got 52 percent with women. Everyone said this couldn't happen,” Trump said.

The president is exaggerating the percentage of women who voted for him in 2016. He won 42 percent of women in the 2016 election, not 52 percent, according to NBC News exit polling. He won 53 percent of white women.

8. Those in the audience who laughed during Trump's big United Nation General Assembly speech this week "weren’t laughing at me, they were laughing with me. We had fun. That was not laughing at me."

See for yourself. Here's the video:

This morning, Todd Purdum noted at The Atlantic that Trump's Surreal News Conference Didn’t Do Kavanaugh Any Favors, portraying "Kavanaugh’s Democratic Senate opponents as the organizers of a 'big, fat con job,' then acknowledged without missing a beat that he would withdraw Kavanaugh’s nomination 'if I thought he was guilty of something like this, sure.' He praised Kavanaugh as 'one of the highest-quality people that I have ever met,' then suggested that the judge’s life was not so spotless, allowing that even George Washington may have had 'a couple of things in his past.'

Is Trump lying, or unintentionally revealing some deep-seated truth about his nature? Surely, the answer is both. Is he being reasonable about Kavanaugh’s accusers (“They’re going to have a big shot at speaking and making their case”)? Or disingenuous (“I can’t tell you whether or not they’re liars until I hear them”)? What does he really think? It changes from minute to minute. Does he contradict himself? Of course. Like Walt Whitman, he is large (or is it huge?). He contains multitudes.

In just over an hour, the president undermined the frantic work of his own White House aides and Senate Republicans, who have been scrambling for days to salvage Kavanaugh’s nomination-- most recently by releasing copies of the judge’s appointment-calendar pages from his Summer of ’82 that list no party like the one where Ford alleges Kavanaugh assaulted her-- by confessing that he regards allegations of sexual misconduct as inherently suspect because of what he considers the spurious claims (by at least 19 women) against him.

“It does impact my opinion,” he said. “You know why? Because I’ve had a lot of false charges made against me. I’m a very famous person. Unfortunately. I’ve been a famous person for a long time. But I’ve had a lot of false charges made against me. Really false charges.” He added: “People want fame, they want money, they want whatever. So when I see it, I view it differently than somebody sitting home watching television where they say, ‘Oh, Judge Kavanaugh, this or that.’”

Trump’s disjointed, incoherent performance ignored the carefully disciplined strategy of the White House and Senate Republicans to plow through the growing swirl of allegations against Kavanaugh and press for a quick confirmation vote. His insistence that “You know what? I could be persuaded” by Ford’s testimony was hardly a ringing endorsement of Kavanaugh, whom in another breath he called “a great gentleman, a great intellect, a brilliant man.” The president’s equivocation-- fleeting though it may have been-- may also reflect the reality that crucial Republican votes like Senator Lisa Murkowksi of Alaska have publicly wavered in recent days.

The cloud of dust kicked up by Trump’s all-over-the-map arguments in no way clarified a fast-moving situation that is already cloudy enough. In addition to the accusations of sexual misconduct cited by Ford, Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick, it emerged late Wednesday that another woman had reached out anonymously to members of the Judiciary Committee and reported that her adult daughter had witnessed an intoxicated Kavanaugh throw another woman aggressively and “sexually” against a wall outside a bar in Washington in 1998. Kavanaugh denied the allegation in an interview with a committee investigator.