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Yeah, all the "That's just Trump, that's the way it is" comes off as a bizarre gimme request by MAGA types to carve out an expection for lying for the most powerful man on the Earth, and it's even more bizarre that they don't appear to see how anyone else could even see it as bizarre.
My objection to the claim "The lies Trump tells are dangerous in a way that should be prioritized" is that I have a long list of lies that seem obviously to be much, much more dangerous than any lie Trump has told, which have caused staggeringly vast amounts of harm and which no one other than MAGA appears willing to address. Entire wars, nation-wide, sustained violations of basic human rights, mass murder committed by government agents, serious crimes committed or enabled for political objectives are a few examples of these harms. I have waited decades to see these lies addressed in any meaningful way, only to be disappointed at every turn. These harms have, in my view, destroyed our previous political system and replaced it with rule by the irresponsible and unaccountable, which has already leaned hard into outright tyranny and is rapidly decaying into ungovernable chaos. Look at the reaction to Kirk's assassination, and imagine what it would have been like if the Butler bullet had been even a single inch to the right.
When Trump makes a statement, I assume that his word on its own means nothing, and I have every confidence that we can hash out the truth. When Biden or Obama or Bush or Clinton made statements, these were treated as truth regardless of contrary evidence and in many cases those questioning them were suppressed. And in fact, these arguments have succeeded in exactly the way I expected, by dragging previously-covered misdeeds into the light via the Streisand Effect. Concern about Epstein's connections was fringe, and now it is mainstream. Concern about unrestrained immigration were fringe, now they are mainstream. Arguments about politicization of the justice department and our security agencies was fringe, now it is mainstream.
Trump's lies have not led me into a position that appears, in hindsight, to be a position I don't want to be in. That is not something I can say for his predecessors or indeed for most of his current opponents.
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Left-wing media lies like dogs on an hourly basis, and even when they're technically not lying, it's in the manner or fae or Aes Sedai, where the limited sentence fragments are "true" in a narrow technical sense while the overall structure is still designed entirely to deceive and propagandize.
Would you care to drop an essay for the class about how bizarre it is that you guys tolerate that?
Yeah, it's now to such an extreme that (unless you interpret it as intended to deceive) it's incoherent. It's not plausibly sincerely mistaken; it's not open to interpretation; it's straight-up constructed to deceive.
It's like, there's such a thing as implicature, folks--and it's part of speech. (IOW: Using implicature to deceive is lying; implicature is speech, you are speaking an untruth.)
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I wouldn't personally trust any media to any particular degree, but that's still an odd point of comparison to the most powerful man on the Earth.
Shockingly enough, even the most powerful man in the world is not as powerful as numerous very powerful men and women working together to achieve their ends. But as noted elsewhere, this is not a problem we have to puzzle out from first principles; we can simply look at actual examples. Tell me, which of Trump's lies has been as damaging as Bush lying America into Iraq?
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