Stupid is as stupid does

| 6:30 am EDT May 27, 2018
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There’s a difference between making a false statement and lying. That difference comes down to whether or not you know a statement is false when you’re making it. Donald Trump lies constantly, and we know this because we constantly catch him saying things we can prove he knows aren’t true. Trump is also intellectually lazy and profoundly ignorant, so there are a lot of basic things he simply doesn’t know. Yesterday we had an odd situation where Trump was almost surely lying, but it’s even scarier if he wasn’t.

It all started when Trump tweeted that he might reinstate his North Korea summit on its original June 12th date. The New York Times quoted an unnamed White House official who had acknowledged there was no logistical way to make this happen. Trump then asserted on Twitter that the Times had faked its source. Various reporters then came out of the woodwork to confirm that they had in fact heard this particular Trump official give this quote. Some of them even produced recordings of it.

Here’s how we know that Trump was lying. He had already tweeted that the summit might be reinstated for June 12th. There was no way that one of his top officials would have then gone to the press and admitted that it was impossible, unless he ran it past Trump first. There’s just no way Trump’s top underlings would have hung him out to dry like that. So it’s reasonable to conclude that Trump’s own people had already told him the summit was off the table for June 12th before they told the New York Times the same thing.

So Donald Trump is lying, right? There are two other realistic explanations here. The first would be would be that Trump’s people informed him the summit couldn’t be reinstated for June 12th due to logistical reasons, and then Trump lost his grasp on that information by the time he posted his tweet. The second would be that he chose not to believe his own people when it came to the logistics, and decided to put June 12th back on the table, under the premise that he could just magically pull it off. Those scenarios are each so profoundly stupid, they’re arguably even scarier than if Trump was simply lying.