The art of the lie: Why Trump is taking issue with Iran's alternative facts

The Age

11 hours ago

Before Trump did it, with an assist from the Supreme Court on Friday, it was Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who worked to erode checks and balances and hoover all the power into the executive branch.
With the malleable George W. Bush in the Oval Office, Cheney and Rumsfeld were able to create an alternative universe where they were never wrong – because they conjured up information to prove they were right.
The two malevolent regents had a fever about getting rid of Saddam Hussein, so they hyped up intelligence, redirecting Americans' vengeful emotions about Osama bin Laden and 9/11 into that pet project. Tony Blair scaremongered that it would take only 45 minutes for Saddam to send his weapons of mass destruction westward.
But there were no WMDs.
When it comes to the Middle East, presidents can't resist indulging in a gasconade. Unlike Iraq, Iran was actually making progress on its nuclear program. Trump did not need to warp intelligence to justify his decision. But he did anyway, to satisfy his unquenchable ego.
He bragged that the strikes had 'OBLITERATED' Iran's nuclear capabilities.
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'I just don't think the president was telling the truth,' Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, told reporters. He believes Iran still has 'significant remaining capability'.
When CNN's Natasha Bertrand and her colleagues broke the story that a preliminary classified US report suggested the strikes had set back Iran by only a few months, Trump, Pete Hegseth and Karoline Leavitt smeared her and The New York Times, which confirmed her scoop, as inaccurate, unpatriotic and disrespectful to our military.
On Friday afternoon, CNN revealed that the military did not even use bunker-buster bombs on one of Iran's largest nuclear targets because it was too deep.
Though Trump likes to hug the flag – and just raised two huge ones on the White House North and South Lawns – he ignores a basic tenet of patriotism: it is patriotic to tell the public the truth on life-or-death matters, and for the press to challenge power. It is unpatriotic to mislead the public in order to control it and suppress dissent, or as a way of puffing up your own ego.
Although he was dubbed the 'daddy' of NATO in The Hague on Wednesday, Trump clearly has daddy issues. (Pass the tissues!) He did not get the affirmation from his father that could have prevented this vainglorious vamping.
For Trump, it was not enough for the strikes to damage Iran's nuclear capabilities; they had to 'obliterate' them. It could not simply be an impressive mission; it had to be, as Hegseth said, 'the most complex and secretive military operation in history'. (Move over, D-Day and crossing the Delaware.)
The president was so eager to magnify the mission that he eerily compared it to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Trump has always believed in 'truthful hyperbole', as he called it in The Art of the Deal. But now it's untruthful hyperbole. He has falsely claimed that an election was stolen and falsely claimed that $US1.7 trillion ($2.6 trillion) in cuts to the social safety net in his Big, Unpopular Bill 'won't affect anybody; it is just fraud, waste and abuse.'
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He's getting help on his alternative universe from all the new partisan reporters in the White House briefing room who are eager to shill for him.
'So many Americans still have questions about the 2020 election,' a reporter told Trump at the news conference on Friday, wondering if he would appoint someone at the Justice Department to investigate judges 'for the political persecution of you, your family and your supporters during the Biden administration'?
Trump beamed. 'I love you,' he said to the young woman. 'Who are you?'
She was, as it turned out, the reporter for Mike Lindell of MyPillow fame, who has his own 'news' network.