It is a pattern. A crime is committed. The President of the United States would prefer for one reason or another not to acknowledge it. So, he turns to the perpetrator and he asks whether they did it. He trumpets their denial as if it were the truth. He then embraces the idea of enlisting them in getting to the bottom of the crime. And, typically, he then seeks to move on having covered it up with a sham investigation and a repeated narrative designed to obscure the facts.
It happened with the Russian attack on the U.S. electorate in 2016. It happened with Brett Kavanaugh. It is now happening with the case of Jamal Khashoggi. The president even cribs from his own talking points going from one case to the other as he did today when he said the Saudi King’s “denial could not be stronger” much as he did when he reported Vladmir Putin vehemently denied the attack on the U.S.
The pattern is consistent with the president’s response to assertions that he has committed crimes. Responses that offer up “investigations” or “transparency” that really amount to cover-ups that are cynically relabeled.
The approach is also identical the president’s comments about climate change to “60 Minutes” correspondent Leslie Stahl this weekend. He acknowledges something is happening but then simply dismisses without evidence that it is what the facts and the scientific community point to. He goes further impugning the credibility of the scientists who have reached different conclusions (which is of course, virtually all of the scientific community.)
Believing in climate change would require him to have to do something about it. He would have to regulate industry and that would be uncomfortable for his supporters. It is literally, for him, an inconvenient truth as so he denies, denies, denies.
For Trump, all truths are inconvenient. Indeed, because this is the case, he has found it necessary to attack all processes that are designed to lead to the truth. He is actively seeking to suck the integrity out of our institutions designed to reveal truths and to institutionalize approaches that validate his fictional, self-serving worldview. We have gone from Congressional oversight to the fraudulent investigations of the Nunes and Trey Gowdy crowd, from FBI background checks designed to root out the facts to the truncated cover-up engineered for Kavanaugh, from promoting scientific assessments of our environment to gutting the scientific components of the government and putting industry shills in their place to ensure that even terms that offend because they are too close to the truth are suppressed.
In the Khashoggi case this now involves accepting the idea the Saudi government can objectively investigate a murder it has likely committed, that it can do so with a Turkish government run by an anti-democratic thug who is clearly seeking to get some kind of better deal with the Americans and the Saudis out of this process and, and he is throwing in a visit to Saudi Arabia by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to certify that this latest charade is up to the (non-existent) standards of the Trump Administration. (This is the same Pompeo who in his spare time is focused on creating the illusion of progress with North Korea and papering over the awkward fact that the North Koreans seem to be continuing to manufacture nuclear warheads while the Trump-Kim love story continues to blossom like dogwoods in Springtime.)
There is always a hint of self-interested spinning and deception in foreign policy. Diplomats are regularly needled for being “good liars.” But for any policy of any type to work it needs to be grounded in the facts. Trump is giving us something different. He is giving us a foreign policy in which most of his major initiatives are founded in lies and willful ignorance. Today’s New York Times had a headline about Trump’s response to the Khashoggi case in which it was called, because of Trump’s focus on the financial elements of the US-Saudi relationship, “realpolitik.” There could be no greater misnomer. What Trump practices is unwahrpolitik—the politics of untruth and lies.
