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By Lu Jiafei
Washington, Oct.10 (APD) -- A real boon of Donald Trump’s presidency comes unexpectedly for me. After failing for years to wean myself off coffee, I’ve recently realized that I no longer covet that dose of caffeine to refresh myself in the morning. Now, I have Trump’s early-hour tweets.
Sometimes, the president’s early-morning unchecked logorrhea could be scary, particularly when he deems it necessary to update his rhetoric grenade on the subject of nuclear Armageddon.
Other times, the quotidian refreshment makes you rack your brains, frenetically searching for the answer to why, in the name of sanity, does a powerful man voluntarily sacrifice his credibility just to bully rivals online.
Over the weekend, Trump launched a new round of brutal broadside on Twitter against Bob Corker, a top Republican leader in the U.S. Senate and a vocal critic of
his presidency, claiming that Corker, who had already announced his retirement, had “begged’ for presidential endorsement of his re-election effort.
“I said ‘NO’ and he dropped out (said he could not win without my endorsement),” Trump tweeted.
Trump also claimed that Corker wanted to be his pick for secretary of state, “I said ‘NO THANKS,’” he tweeted, before falsely blaming Corker as being “largely responsible for the horrendous Iran Deal.”
Trump’s claim that Corker “begged” for endorsement was soon refuted by Todd Womack, Corker's chief of staff, who said that it was Trump who had asked Corker to run and promised his endorsement.
“The president called Senator Corker on Monday afternoon and asked him to reconsider his decision not to seek reelection and reaffirmed that he would have endorsed him, as he has said many times,”
Womack said in a statement.
So far, multiple media reports have cited sources inside the White House as saying that Corker did not ask for Trump’s endorsement. It was Trump who offered it.
Eight months into Trump’s young yet chaotic presidency, his dubious relationship to facts has infamously become his trademark.
Trump’s inaugural ceremony in January drew the largest crowd in U.S. history, except that it was easily debunked.
His predecessor Barack Obama wiretapped the Trump Tower during last year’s presidential campaign, except that his own Justice Department concluded that it had no evidence to support his unsubstantiated claim.
Trump fired FBI director James Comey because he was following a recommendation by the deputy attorney general who concluded Comey had mishandled the Hillary Clinton email investigation, except that Trump himself later bragged about it being his own decision and citing the Russia investigation as the main reason.
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto called Trump to praise his controversial border policy, except that Pena Nieto's office later said that the phone call was nonexistent.
For Trump, those bald-faced untruths on issues domestic and foreign, significant and petty, are acceptable when they suit his purpose. The dangerous credibility gap that his unconventional presidency has caused to the White House is not on his mind. Only his frail ego matters.
You can’t simply expect Trump to grow a more serious relationship with facts. After all, he won the election by launching a campaign fraught with distortion and fibs. According to PolitiFact, a reputable fact-checking website, only 16 percent of Trump’s audited statements made in the election were better than “half true.”
Trump’s blatant disrespect for facts could spell disaster for himself amid a security challenge, say, the Korean Peninsula nuclear crisis.
While tops officials from his administration are scrambling to rally support globally to tackle the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) nuclear ambition, Trump is single-handedly undoing any efforts by spreading misinformation on issues large and small.
As written by Antony J. Blinken, deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration, in an opinion for the New York Times, it’s one thing for a foreign partner to doubt a president’s judgment; it’s entirely more debilitating when that partner doubts the president’s word.
I’m afraid that the world has already lost faith in Trump’s credibility and only himself could reverse the disbelief.
Lu Jiafei, researcher of APD Institute. After spending one year in Palestine covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict between 2013 and 2014, Lu moved to Washington, D.C. and covered the 2016 U.S. presidential election till the very end of Donald Trump’s upset victory. He is a political contributor to APD.
(ASIA PACIFIC DAILY)
