Former President Donald Trump told an entirely fictional story on Saturday about how he had supposedly outwitted his Democratic opponents by releasing “the tape” of the 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that was a key factor in Trump’s first impeachment.
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Facts First: Trump’s story is a complete fabrication. No tape of his call with Zelensky was ever released; Pelosi could not possibly have been angry with her allies after hearing a tape of the call because she has never heard a tape of the call. In fact, as of nearly five years after the July 2019 call, there is no known US recording of the conversation. What Trump’s White House actually released in September 2019 was a rough written transcript of the call — which corroborated, rather than contradicted, a government whistleblower’s central allegations about what Trump had said. Pelosi spokesperson Aaron Bennett said Sunday that Trump’s story is “fact-free nonsense.”
I mean fuck it. I say we start demanding that he release the tape. Stop treating him like a fucking dotard.
I mean, yeah, but that’s just playing rational defense against his idiocy.
We should be playing rationally irrational offense. They are straight up making things up. So sane people should make things up in response, but at the same time be careful to make the fabrications close enough to reality (or even just a misrepresentation of reality) that they gain traction.
Seriously: astroturfing shit that stupid people will believe is very obviously a valid political tactic these days. And the right has been aggressively playing that game for a while now, which is why they seem to have an impenetrable 30–ish% approval rating as a floor.
I’m with you, but what could possibly be said about Trump that his followers wouldn’t dismiss as “fake news” or outright praise him for. They don’t even care that he’s a rapist.
It’s not about them believing any one story in particular. It’s about moving the median point of the atmosphere they’re immersed in subtly in a less awful direction.
More directly: I’m saying we should be using dirty tricks to move the Overton window in a more positive and constructive direction, because they’ve been using the same tricks in the interest of increasing wealth disparity and concentration for decades.
