In an interview with CNN’s Brian Stelter, columnist Andrew Sullivan addressed President Trump’s pathological penchant for lying.
The interview was prefaced around Sullivan’s latest article for New York Magazine, titled “The Madness of King Donald,” where the author even goes so far as to question the President’s mental health.
In the article, Sullivan eloquently points out the difference between Trump’s brand of lying as opposed to the lies ‘all politicians’ tell.
“It’s now a commonplace that Trump and his underlings tell whoppers. Fact-checkers have never had it so good,” Sullivan writes. “But all politicians lie. Bill Clinton could barely go a day without some shading or parsing of the truth. Richard Nixon was famously tricky. But all the traditional political fibbers nonetheless paid some deference to the truth — even as they were dodging it. They acknowledged a shared reality and bowed to it. They acknowledged the need for a common set of facts in order for a liberal democracy to function at all. Trump’s lies are different. They are direct refutations of reality — and their propagation and repetition is about enforcing his power rather than wriggling out of a political conundrum.”
Stelter started out the interview asking Sullivan why he characterized the myriad controversies surrounding Trump’s young presidency as a “national emergency.”
“Because any liberal democracy, any constitutional democracy relies upon something we call the ‘objective truth,'” Sullivan replied.
“…and what we’ve discovered is that in the last three weeks, this president, rather like he did on the campaign trail, simply insists that black is white — that things that we can see with our own eyes, like the size of his inauguration crowd, are not exactly what we’re seeing.”
“It’s about the ability of the president to tell the truth and for us to believe it,” Sullivan continued. “And to have such an unstable figure incapable of accepting reality at the center of the world, is an extremely dangerous thing.”
Stelter asked Sullivan what gave him the right to question Trump mental stability. Sullivan acknowledged that he’s not in a position to diagnose anyone, but he is able to make observations like any other thinking human being.
“When [Trump] says the murder rate is the highest its been in 45 to 47 years, what are we supposed to do? … He’s saying things that do not exist.”
Watch the interview in the video below:
Featured image via screen grab. To follow Sky Palma on Facebook, click here.
Leave a Reply