Hurricane Helene hit the East Coast last week and like most hurricanes, wildfires and tornados, there’s a lot of people of people hurting that need help at the moment. The stories out of North Carolina for example, are pretty grim. Many people have lost everything. It’s really sad. There are lots of good stories too of families coming together, neighbors helping each other and volunteers doing everything they can to relieve some of the pain and anxiety.
The media however is busy telling a different story – Trump, Vance, his closest supporters and the biggest MAGA accounts on Twitter are lying about pretty much everything and its exhausting. Do we really have to live like this for the rest of my life? We’re just weeks removed from the “Haitians are eating pets of the people who live there” lies and now this . . . .
When I was younger, it always felt like people expressed more civic pride in their country. Even when we weren’t great, we pretended we were bad ass. Team America World Police was a fantastic satire of this very premise but younger folks wouldn’t get the jokes today because it feels like more Americans hate who we are or who we’ve become than those who still cherish this nation.
The biggest lies about the hurricane are that 1) FEMA spent billions on illegal immigrant accommodations and thus has no money left for hurricane relief, 2) FEMA isn’t delivering supplies to counties that support Trump (i.e. more Trump voters than Harris/Biden/Obama voters), 3) FEMA is keeping supplies for themselves, and 4) Republican state governors can’t get the White House on the phone. To my knowledge off the top of my head, Republican governors from Tennessee and Georgia refuted these allegations, as did WWE legend Kane, who is a TN mayor and huge MAGA head. I saw a Republican congressman also refute these lies.
Look. If any of the above were true, I would be mad as hell and would be disqualifying. Of course, none of it is. I do remember when Trump refused to help California during wildfires and then a story broke recently that his staff showed him data that the towns impacted by the fires were red counties and Trump suddenly had a change of heart. When 40ish percent of the population believes that the government is not helping, what I assume are poor whites in rural Appalachia, it creates this perception that the country is far worse than it actually is. Lies of this kind make the country feel worse and naturally people become angry.
Lying is part of politics. I don’t accept that, but it is true. The Democrats lie and exaggerate too but hardly to the degree that Trump does and certainly less about the state of the country than before. For the last decade, Democrats exaggerated the problems of racism and white supremacy, which had the same effect as the FEMA lies. But the past Democratic lies do not excuse Trump’s and Trump’s lies are not isolated to FEMA. Everything is a lie. The economy is doing much better today than under Trump but Trump was responsible for, in his words, “the greatest economy in the world.” Trump keeps saying that Kamala is a Communist. She obviously is not and there was a time were calling an American politician a Communist was out of bounds. More ironically, Trump is the biggest Putin Fanboy on the planet.
America is still awesome. But we need to operate together under one set of facts and truths to compete with China on the world stage. Trump lies about the state of the country because he wants to win so badly, to erase the impeachments and his 2020 loss, that he’s willing to drag the country completely into the gutter.
Why would we reward this behavior? It’s so damn unpatriotic and selfish, although selfish doesn’t really accurately describe what we’re witnessing. I’d call it narcissism but I’m not a doctor. Then again, I have eyes, ears and can think for myself.
The Reasonable Man Standard 