other98: trump’s latest whopper is that vandals took a knife to the new paint job at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and somehow the National Park Service, the cops, and half the press played along like that made sense. A deputy director swore in a court filing that the liner was “cut with a sharp knife or razor,” but anyone scrolling through the literally hundreds of photos out there can see that coating peeling and flaking off in chunks, with zero sign of a clean blade cut anywhere. Nobody grabs a knife when they want to strip paint off concrete, that is just not a thing that happens.
This is the gaslighting playbook we have watched for years now. trump says something insane, officials back him up, then the media repeats it like gospel, and the public is left wondering if they are the crazy one for noticing the obvious gap between the claim and the evidence. We saw it with the stolen 2020 election lie that still will not die, we saw it with the Haitians eating pets nonsense that got repeated on a debate stage, and we saw it after the rally shooting when his ear reportedly took a graze and somehow looked flawless days later with barely a mark, no real explanation given, and nobody in mainstream coverage pushed very hard on it. And on and on and on for ten damn years of this rambling maniac’s word being taken seriously.
Each time, the same pattern plays out. A claim with no real evidence gets stated, officials nod along, and the press treats repetition as confirmation instead of doing the basic work of checking it against what people can literally see with their own eyes. The whole scenario is right out of Orwell’s 1984 where he wrote, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
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