We’re witnessing the unraveling of a man in real time
“President” Donald Trump claimed that he could see a Chinese trade deal from the stairs in France while at the G7. Trump claimed that China had called him twice and tried to make a deal to end the trade war. Investors in the U.S. ate this shite sandwich up and the markets soared, having apparently forgotten all the other “deals” he has negotiated with North Korea, Japan, Canada, Mexico, China before, and just about every other nation.
However, one problem. The fact checkers looking into the utterances from Trump’s mouth heard from Geng Shuang, spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, who confirmed that no such calls took place. CNN’s Garrett Graff summed it up well in a tweet, stating, “It kind of seems like a big deal that Donald Trump is just ‘inventing’ phone calls with a key foreign adversary… and bodes poorly for a future crisis.”
Sadly, this was not the only lie about meetings with our allies and adversaries that Trump has invented in the last twenty-four hours. Earlier today, Palmer Report documented Trump’s bizarre lie about why he skipped a G7 meeting, and an even more bizarre lie involving Melania Trump and Kim Jong Un.
We have not seen anything quite like this before. We have a president who is altering facts and reality, and in the meantime, making us not to be trusted by any other nation. We might think we can go this alone, but alas, this is an interconnected world and we need allies. We now live in a world where we have to go to other countries and their media and their diplomats to get any sense of what really happened.
And all the while, Donald Trump is putting us in a terrible position on the world stage, including having the official White House Twitter account tweet about the next G7 Summit potentially taking place at his own The Doral golf club, with his special guest Vladimir Putin. We might not see a 2020 G7 Summit, as this is something many world leaders – and the United States – should bristle at. In the meantime, the feckless GOP remains silent as we witness the unraveling of a man.
Daniel is a lawyer writing and teaching about SCOTUS, and is the author of the book “The Chief Justices” about the SCOTUS as seen through the center seat.