CSotD: How the Other 45.5% Live
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Karoline Leavitt repeatedly says that this is the most transparent presidency ever, prompting the wisecrack from the left of “Yes, we can see through you.”
And Leavitt herself is often cited as the most blatantly dishonest White House Press Secretary in history, not simply spinning the facts to put them in the most advantageous light but telling absolute lies and attacking the media for asking legitimate questions.
On his podcast, The Daily Blast, Greg Sargent discussed Leavitt with Mark Jacob, who blogs at the Stop The Presses Substack, about such astonishing pronouncements as her defense of Trump’s reminiscence of his uncle John talking about having had Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, as a student at MIT.
It’s a ridiculous story: Kaczynski didn’t go to MIT and Dr. John Trump died a decade before Kaczynski was unmasked as the Unabomber. They wouldn’t have been professor and student, and Professor Trump couldn’t have discussed him with his nephew because neither of them would have ever heard of him.
But when the Independent’s Andrew Feinberg asked about it at a White House press briefing, Leavitt chewed him out for asking, then failed to address the question:
Andrew, with so many issues going on in the world, I’m a little bit surprised you would ask such a question—although I’m not, sometimes, coming from you, I will say. But I’m willing to give you an answer nevertheless. The president’s uncle did, in fact, teach at MIT. He was a very intelligent professor. The president’s very proud of his family. In fact, the president has a letter from his uncle on the MIT letterhead that sits in the Oval Office dining room. Maybe we’ll let you see it sometime.
That story may be the most absurd thing she has defended, but it’s far from the only example of what Sargent and Jacob agreed is her performing not for the press but for the president, saying what he wants to hear rather than telling the press anything of value.
As Jacob suggested:
Frankly, these press conferences have become really meaningless. I think that your first string reporters shouldn’t even go. I think maybe you send interns in, they roll tape, and you see what’s worthwhile. Good journalists can spend their time a lot better than listening to her lie to them and mock them.
If you believe the new budget does not add to the deficit and that the president has lost money while in office, feel free to disagree with that assessment.
In Herbert’s cartoon, however, Leavitt says aloud the metamessage behind her actual statements, and his, and none of those messages are particularly cloaked.
This may indeed be the most transparent administration ever.
Leavitt’s job has become more challenging as the damage of the Epstein case begins to shatter the faith of Trump’s supporters. His approval rating has dipped to 45.5% overall, with a steep decline in support for his immigration policies, once the high point of his approval.
And nearly 2/3’s of voters disapprove of how he is handling the Epstein scandal, which Whamond suggests has him scrambling for distractions.
Cousineau agrees, citing the sudden, inexplicable attack on Rosie O’Donnell, who had not simply sunk out of sight recently but had exiled herself to Ireland, though she popped up long enough to respond to Dear Leader’s insults, and her snapback may have gotten more attention than his original threat.
Trump has also decided that Coca-Cola should be made with cane sugar rather than corn syrup, and that the Washington Commanders and Cleveland Guardians should take back their former, racist nicknames, threatening to block the Commanders’ new stadium if they don’t comply.
The White House even jumped on the Superman bandwagon with a bit of AI captioned “THE SYMBOL OF HOPE. TRUTH. JUSTICE. THE AMERICAN WAY. SUPERMAN TRUMP,” which drew more ridicule than applause, given that the MAGA crowd hates the fact that Superman was an immigrant, and, besides, on-line observers are more hip to memes than Dear Leader’s crew.
The significance of the Superman brouhaha being that it penetrates into MAGAland.
Other arguments do not.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Both men in these cartoons begin to see through the Epstein deceptions, but Slyngstad’s uses that insight to question other articles of faith in Trump World.
If that’s happening, it’s only at the fringe, only nibbling away at support.
Sheneman seems more on target: The MAGA faithful may be shaken by Trump running counter to their well-established storyline about Epstein, but they’re deeply committed to being the smartest people in the room and to knowing facts that the rest of the world denies.
But they’re not watching Newshour on PBS or reading the Guardian or listening to All Things Considered and disagreeing with what is said there. If they hear anything about sources like that, it is because someone on X or talkradio or Fox or Newsmax is attacking the source as an example of woke, lying libtards.
Their political consumption is the equivalent of the religious input of people who attend fundamentalist churches where they are assured that the world was created 5000 years ago, that it took six days and that dinosaurs and cavemen coexisted.
MAGA true believers only hear one side of the political story, while whatever they hear of dissenting views is dismissed as false, foolish and diabolical.
It may be amusing that, despite Trump’s on-again, off-again friendship with Putin, the rightwing still uses “socialism” and “communism” as scare words, and even more ironic that Trump has engineered a deal that gives the president a “golden share” of US Steel, which is an example of the central government seizing the means of production, or, as the textbooks call it, “Communism.”
More central to the discussion, however, is the righthand panel of Bok’s cartoon, in which strong disagreement with conservative justices is not the push-and-pull of democracy but, rather, a disagreement with revealed truth. It is sin, whether expressed in church or in the voting booth.
To be clear, not all conservatives are MAGA hardliners, or we wouldn’t be seeing Trump’s approval rates decline.
There are good, decent people out there, but reaching them, as Jesus counseled, requires that you not waste efforts on those who will not hear.
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