The Twilight Zone
I make it a point to watch those White House daily briefings. Why? So you don’t have to.
They offer me a keen insight into the mind of President Trump. It’s like taking a walk down memory lane and into “a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination.”
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, has the unenviable task of trying to make sense of the near-daily messes her boss hands her. Those briefings are usually contentious, thrust and parry affairs. An array of White House correspondences thrust; Sanders does a lot of parrying. It’s not pretty. But it is often entertaining.
Last Tuesday, Sanders was asked about the latest flap between President Trump and Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, who’d claimed the White House had become an “adult day care center” that was careening the U.S. headfirst into WWIII. Sanders response? “You’re entitled to your own opinions. You’re not entitled to your own facts,” she replied, as if Corker’s opinion should be subjected to fact-checking.
It’s not. It’s an opinion.
But what makes Sanders’ response so bizarre is that she works for a man who’s set world records for falsehoods. According to the Washington Post, during his first 263 days in office, Donald Trump has told 1,318 whoppers — or near whoppers. Apparently, he thinks he IS entitled to his own facts.
Earlier that day, he’d sat in the Oval Office and fired off one of his favorite lies. “We’re the highest taxed nation in the world,” he told reporters.
Certainly, he’s been told that the U.S. isn’t nearly the highest taxed country in the world, but he keeps saying it is, anyway. By any metric, there are countries around the world that have higher, or much higher tax rates.
But when Sanders was asked about Trump’s false tax assertion, she mixed more fiction with the existing fiction, to come up with a brand-new fiction. “We are the high-taxed corporate tax in the developed economy,” she proclaimed. She added, “That’s a fact.”
You see what she did there, don’t you? She called a provable lie a fact. She deserves a raise just for that.
It’s a kind of twisted, then blurred recitation of a non-fact, buttressed by bold certainty — that’s become the hallmark the Trump presidency. It’s your favorite episode of The Twilight Zone, played out in real time.
Sanders concluded that particular colloquy with the reporter about tax rates, by claiming, “We’re just going to have to agree to disagree.” Ugh!
Earlier that day, during that Oval Office press availability, Trump was asked about his ongoing controversy with his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Tillerson had been quoted as calling the president a “moron.”
“I think it’s fake news,” Trump said during an interview with Forbes magazine. “But if he did that (called him a moron), I guess we’ll have to compare IQ tests. And I can tell you who is going to win,” he concluded. (CNN keeps a repository of the times Trump has brandished his IQ as a way of questioning the intelligence of his detractors. The most recent number is 22 times.)
When asked if he was undercutting Tillerson with those kinds of remarks, Trump went full Twilight Zone. “No, I don’t undercut anybody. I don’t believe in undercutting people,” as if he hadn’t built his entire presidential campaign and his early presidency by undercutting anybody who doesn’t swoon at the mere mention of his name.
While the Washington Post chronicles his frequent lies and CNN keeps a count of his IQ references, the New York Times keeps a running log of “The 380 people, places and things Donald Trump has insulted on Twitter.”
Mr. Trump is an undercutting machine. Too bad Rod Serling isn’t around to see this.
Edward A. Owens is a multi-Emmy Award winner, former reporter and anchor for Entertainment Tonight and 20-year TV news veteran. Email him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net.