When nightmare ghoul Rudy Giuliani went on Sean Hannity's Festival of Self-Fellatio and said, more or less, "Yeah, Trump paid back Michael Cohen for hush money so Stormy Daniels wouldn't talk about fucking Trump," which was followed up by Trump saying, "Sure, I paid Cohen to shut Daniels up so she wouldn't say I fucked her, but I totally didn't fuck her," the commentariat of American media has been rending its garments over the fact that Trump lied earlier when he said he didn't know anything about the payment (and, c'mon, he totally fucked porn star Stormy Daniels).
And we're not even talking about MSNBC here. We're talking Rupert Murdoch-owned Trump ball washers here. A Wall Street Journal editorial says, "Mr. Trump should worry that Americans will stop believing anything he says." Over on Fox "news," guinea pig-faced Neil Cavuto did an entire commentary on Trump's lies. Well, he didn't call them "lies," saying, "I'm not saying you're a liar, I'm just having a devil of a time figuring out which news is fake." Still, he did say, "I guess you’ve been too busy draining the swamp to stop and smell the stink you’re creating. That’s your doing. That’s your stink. Mr. President, that’s your swamp."
Admirably (no, really), Cavuto didn't just say it was about Daniels. He also brought up how Trump keeps asserting there was massive voter fraud in 2016 when there just wasn't. And he said, "Or that millions of illegals voted in the last election, but they didn't." On that last one, it's just absolutely necessary to point out that one of the people also hyping the false story that undocumented immigrants were going to vote in 2016 was...fuckin' Neil Cavuto.
In the Washington Post, Dan Balz wonders how the voting public will react to Trump's lies: "Does it bother anyone that the president has been shown to be a liar?" He continues, "People will answer them differently, depending on their views about Trump. Some will condemn the behavior. Some will condone it. Many, no doubt, will try to look away, even if that has become more and more difficult. The questions won’t go away. They are part of the fabric of this presidency." And, as an example of presidents lying, he gives the legitimately tired example of Bill Clinton saying he did not have sex with Monica Lewinsky. Except Clinton was punished mightily for that statement, a line that had absolutely zero effect on anything to do with the lives of the people of the nation, unlike, say, Trump lying about the effects of the tax cuts or immigration or any of the thousands of other things he lies about.
In fact, if you really wanna go to the recent nadir of presidents lying, you'd have to make that George W. Bush lying to the American public about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. At the bare minimum, Bush lied by not saying that there was doubt of the WMDs' existence even within his administration. More likely, he and Cheney and the rest just outright lied to Congress and to all of us about it. The results of that lie were thousands of American deaths and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Iraqi deaths.
Bush's punishment? Nothing. The GOP simply refused to go along with any real investigation, let alone prosecution (even in the form of impeachment) for very real war crimes. Shit, Democrats let him off the hook, too, especially President Obama. And now Bush gets to be treated like some kind of honorable, beloved former leader because Americans have the attention span of an Addy-snorting teen looking at her Instagram feed.
So it's just downright laughable to see and read all this huffing and puffing about Trump's lies, as if he hadn't spent his whole miserable fucking life lying, as if his idiot hordes don't love him for his lies. We are long past the question of whether anything will make his core voters turn against him. They won't. He could go Thanos on them and say that if half of them are killed, there would be more jobs and fewer immigrants, and they'd fuckin' race each other to throw themselves off a cliff for him. Trump owns their souls like a good devil would.
Even worse is the expectation that the Republican Party might stand strong against a lying president. It's so pathetic a notion that it's not even worth talking about.
It's not that all these Republicans and other assorted conservative nutzoids are fine with him lying. It's not even that they believe him over reality (although that's certainly true). It's that they don't care. As long as they are getting what they want, be it tax cuts or racist policies or just stickin' it to the libtards, the rest is just a whole bunch of noise.
We on the left hear Trump's words as lies over Stormy Daniels. His supporters just hear their hero, and his words fuckin' glow, man, they fuckin' shine. He could stand up there and announce, "I shit gold," and they'd make his turds their currency.