Exhibit A

You know I try to stay away from politics here, but some things that I see serve so beautifully as life lessons and examples, I just have to give them some serious thought. And like my tagline has said from the beginning (“Thoughts if you want them…”), you can take them for whatever they’re worth to you. 

I know for the most part I’m preaching to the choir here, so maybe some of you will actually get it. But maybe there’ll be someone who won’t so much. Still, I try to stay true to some kind of logic, so here we are. I’m gonna look at something that, to me, defies logic. But please hang in there and try to follow along. Maybe we can all learn something today… 

It’s not hard to put your thumb on many of the things that are wrong with Donald Trump. He is so utterly devoid of integrity when it comes to his self-portrayal (among other issues of character) that one would have to be a fool to actually fall for what he says with any regularity. 

And yet, it seems the world is full of fools. We know this, but…c’mon. Can people really be this stupid? 

What caught my eye today was a quote from a recent interview. Now, I must preface this with saying regardless of what you think of Anthony Fauci, his politics and actions aren’t the point here. It’s what Trump tells us in one line that serves as such a clear example of how he talks and how foolish people are to believe him. 

Here’s what he said: 

“No, no, no, Dr. Fauci was there. First of all, he’s civil service, and you’re not allowed to fire him. But forget that because I don’t necessarily go by everything … but Dr. Fauci would tell me things, and I wouldn’t do them in many cases. But also, he wasn’t a big player in my administration.” 

Again…and read this part slowly if you need to: “…you’re not allowed to fire him. But forget that because I don’t necessarily go by everything.” 

In one sentence, Donald Trump says “I could not fire him, but I could have fired him if I wanted.”  He admitted that he had the power to do it because, even though “you’re not allowed to fire him,” we can “forget that because I don’t necessarily go by everything.” In other words, “I could have fired him because I don’t always play be the rules.” 

But we know this is an irrefutable fact (…for now): He didn’t fire Fauci. Even though he could have. But don’t fault him, because he couldn’t fire him. Except…”forget that” because he could have because “I don’t necessarily go by everything.” But he didn’t. 

This is getting tedious, but I’ve gotta ask his supporters anyway: “Which is it?” 1) Were your man’s hands tied because Fauci was a civil servant, and you can’t fire civil servants; or 2) could Trump really have fired Fauci if he wanted to because (rebel that he is) he doesn’t necessarily go by everything he’s told. If it’s the first option, then he lied to your face when he told you the second, in which case he looks extremely weak. Weak people lie to cover up the fact that they can’t do something. If it’s second option, well, then why didn’t he? I mean, that’s the whole issue behind this part of the interview, right? Fauci was the bad guy in all of this (or this wouldn’t be an issue), so why didn’t Trump fire the bad guy?  

If Trump himself, in that same interview, can rewrite history by making up a whole raft of things about DeSantis doing things that Trump himself praised when DeSantis did them, why should anyone believe him when he says he could’ve fired Fauci (and here we go again) because “I don’t necessarily go by everything”? The one boogeyman of the whole Covid mess upon whom a lot of the Trump crowd and the right agrees lies a great deal of responsibility [whether rightly so, I cannot say)] for all of the things they hated most about Covid: the lockdowns, the masks, the forced vaccinations …and Trump didn’t fire him.  

But he could have. According to him. So…why not?

I’m sure Trump supporters have an answer for this all because they have to have something they can tell themselves to justify supporting him (no matter how weak that justification). I just want to hear it, if only to bolster my own view that mankind is, for the most part, working full time to convince themselves that all is well by falling for just about anything as long as it sounds good to them and their side. 

And this, thankfully, leads me to one of my favorite quotes: 

“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” 

G. K. Chesterton

Many have replaced God with their own versions of something else, and I can see it no more clearly than in the politics of the American people. And Donald Trump is exhibit A.