What is Truth, After All?

Every other decade or so, some public official blurts out something that pithily and memorably sums the absurdity of our times. We’re old enough to recall President Richard Nixon telling a press conference that “I am not a crook,” and President Bill Clinton saying under oath and on videotape that “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is” is,” and his harridan of a wife and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton telling a congressional committee investigating her deadly Benghazi debacle “What, at this this point, does it matter?” President Donald Trump has already had several such outbursts, but his lead television lawyer Rudy Giuliani topped them all on Sunday when he appeared on the National Broadcasting Company’s decades-old “Meet the Press” program and declared that “Truth isn’t truth.”

Put in its proper context, it sounds even worse. Giuliani was of course being asked about the “Russia thing,” which is looking increasingly bad for his client these days, and the once formidable federal prosecutor and legendarily successful New York City mayor was making yet another recent mess of it. Asked to respond to the day’s New York Times report that White House Don McGhan counsel had provided some 30 hours of of testimony to the special counsel investigation into the “Russia thing,” Giuliani unconvincingly argued that was a good thing. Asked about the meeting that the president’s namesake son and son-in-law and now-on-trial campaign manager had with some Russian operatives in Trump’s namesake Trump Tower, Giuliani insisted that none knew in advance they were meeting with Russians, even though the e-mail chain that Trump Jr. was forced to release made it plainly clear they not only knew they were meeting with Russians but Russians they had been credibly assured were agents of a Russian government effort to help the Trump campaign, with Trump Jr. infamously proclaiming “I love it!”

Asked the by-now inevitable questions about whether Trump would testify to the special counsel, Giuliani replied that “I am not going to be rushed into having testify so that he gets trapped into perjury.” He further explained that “When you tell me (Trump) should testify because he’s going to tell the truth and that he shouldn’t worry, that’s so silly — because it’s somebody’s version of the truth. Not the truth.”

div style=”text-indent:29px;”>At this point “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd — or that “sleepy-eyed son-of-a-bitch,” as Trump has called him — interjected the perfectly tautological comment that “Truth is truth.” At that point, Giuliani uttered his soon-to-be-in-“Bartlett’s-Famous-Quotations” response that “No, it isn’t truth. Truth isn’t truth.”

Meanwhile, Trump spent much of the Lord’s Day “tweeting” about the “Russia thing,” blasting the hated New York Times for failing to emphasize that Trump had allowed Mcgann’s testimony, and comparing the special counsel’s investigation into the whole “Russia thing” to McCarthyism. Trump couldn’t have prevented the testimony of McGhan in any case, as he represents the office of the presidency rather than the president of the moment and currently has more incentive to protect it rather than it’s current occupant, and the ridiculous comparison to commie-baiting Sen. Joseph just invited all the Trum-bashing media to note that both McCarthy and Trump had the same lawyer, and that the silently rigorous special counsel investigation isn’t really analogous to McCarthyism at all.”.

At this point the two extant theories are that the Trump campaign conspired with Russian government efforts to influence the past presidential election, or that a seemingly failed “deep state” conspiracy with Russia and that awful Clinton woman and all those damned Democrats to prevent Trump’s presidency is now coming to its perfectly diabolical conclusion. Both scenarios are admittedly far-fetched, so we’ll leave it to the reader to choose between them. It’s perfectly tautological that only one of them can be true, but these days truth isn’t truth, and at risk to your security clearance status you can take your pick.

— Bud Norman

The Reality Show Goes On

President Donald Trump is now calling Omarosa Manigault Newman a “low-life,” and we can’t argue with the description. Newman is now saying that Trump is a racist and sexist with diminished intellectual capabilities, and that also sounds apt. There’s no one to root for in this tawdry feud, and we don’t expect either combatant will come out of it looking at all good.

In case you’d happily forgotten, Newman is the recurring reality show villainess who once helped make “The Apprentice” a ratings hit and wound up as the highest-ranking African-American in the White House as a reward. She was obsequiously loyal to her benefactor, at one point telling an interviewer that “every critic, every detractor will have to bow down to President Trump,” but she didn’t seem to do much else for her $180,000-a-year salary but created scandals, and she was ushered out by chief of staff John Kelly. At first Newman remained loyal to Trump, although she had some choice words for Kelly and her mostly black critics in the press, but that’s no longer true.

Newman landed on her feet with a role in yet another reality show, “Big Brother,” where she whispered to another contestant that the Trump White House is even more chaotic than it seems, and that “It’s not going to be OK.” Now she’s on seemingly every channel plugging a soon-to-be-released tell-all book that contradicts every kind word she ever had for Trump. In doing so, she’s created a couple more embarrassing stories about the administration.

On the National Broadcasting Company’s venerable and usually polite “Meet the Press” Sunday morning program, Newman played a recording she’d surreptitiously made of her firing in the White House “Situation Room.” The fact that she would surreptitiously record a conversation in the White House does not speak well of her character, but that she was able to do so in the White House’s most carefully secured space does not speak well of the administration’s competence.

The tape also includes Kelly telling Newman that no harm would come to her reputation if she kept toeing the administration line in her comments to the press, which isn’t even a veiled threat about what would happen if she didn’t, and that will only enhance the Trump administration’s reputation for bullying people into silence. She’s also got a contract that was offered her by presidential daughter-in-law Lara Trump to stay silent in exchange for a $15,000-a-month job as a a “minority outreach” consultant for Trump’s never-ending presidential campaign, which included the offer that she could work at home or not all, which will only enhance the administration’s reputation for buying troublesome women’s silence.

The president should be pleased that Newman is getting some scathing press, with critics noting that she defended Trump against charges of sexism in the aftermath of the “Access Hollywood” and insisted he wasn’t racist when he found very fine people on both sides of a neo-Nazi rally, and her efforts to lament that she was the only African-American in the White House only further infuriate the many credential black conservatives who believe she blocked them from jobs. She defends her surreptitious recordings by saying that the White House is full of back-stabbers, but she still seems to relish own villainous role there.

None of which, of course, does much to help guy who promised hire only the best people and wound up with such a low-life as Newman instead.

— Bud Norman