I’ve stretched the truth countless times throughout my life. When I was younger I would embellish a tale a bit to mask an otherwise mundane existence. I found myself to be very uninteresting and therefore I compensated by making the story bigger. Honestly, I considered the habit to be a pretty significant personality fault and for the past couple of decades I’ve made a very conscious effort to break the trend. I feel I’ve been very successful and recognizing and correcting this trait has made me a better person. We should all strive to be better people. It’s part of the human equation.
The fact of the matter is, you can’t lie about facts. When the numbers are printed in black and white or multiple folks tell one story while one person is saying something completely different, it’s pretty hard to deny the truth. And I have a really hard time accepting anything but the truth, especially from our elected officials. We don’t have a lot left in Washington, I’d like to think that we have at least some truth coming from our highest offices. Unfortunately, the truth is that I’m completely naive about that.
President-elect Trump (and I’m sticking to my promise to respect the office, regardless of what I think of the man) erupted with some sort of Twitter rant again yesterday, this time about the election results audits getting underway in key states across the country. His tweet talked about his winning of the popular vote, if it wasn’t for the “millions of illegal votes” for Secretary Clinton. I’m always amazed that the next person to hold the highest office in the world has the communication skills of a junior high school student and the temperament of a five year old. But this is what we are saddled with.
There is absolutely no evidence of dozens of illegal votes for Clinton, let alone millions of votes. His words are not an embellishment, they are an outright lie. There is absolutely no truth to his claims of illegal votes for Clinton. There is no evidence to be found. Unfortunately, Trump the presidential candidate is acting no different as President-elect. While his bombastic screaming of lies wooed millions of people to vote for him in the election, his distortion of the truth has no place in his role as President. He keeps repeating his lies until he believes them and then he expects the American public to do the same. Unfortunately, too many folks buy into this and start repeating the same lie, trying to solidify these falsehoods as truth.
Campaign Manager Kellyanne Conway tweeted today about “a mandate” for a Trump presidency. The people have spoken with this “landslide” victory. She called it a historic win. Again, more lies, more distortions trumpeted loudly. The louder the more like it’s the truth, right? I have no idea how that woman sleeps at night.
Whatever.
The true historical value of this election is the fact that there has never been such a wide disparity between the popular vote and the Electoral College. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by over two million votes. And the absolute final results are still being tabulated. There is no mandate. There’s little hope for unity. I fear there’s little hope at all.
The truth of the matter is I’m already beyond tired of this presidency and it hasn’t even officially begun. It’s hard to respect the highest office in the land when you can’t believe a word that he says. Trust in government? No one in their right mind would trust anything from a Trump Administration.
But then again, a lot of people trust reality television as being real. And that’s what we have now, right? Reality television trying to be a real Presidential administration.
God help us all.
