House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) went viral for two things last week:
- For the condescending way she clapped at Trump during his State of the Union Address (SOTU).
- For the discerning way she characterized Trump’s habitual lies, insults, complaints, and criticisms.
I am on record dismissing the SOTU as a spectacle. I refer you to commentaries like “State of the Union Address: ‘A Political Spectacle’ … Take 2,” January 29, 2014, and “Obama Delivers Final State of the Union Address. Thank God!” January 14, 2016. Therefore, I won’t dignify Trump’s with any comment.
On the other hand, I cannot resist commenting on the way the media hailed Pelosi’s characterization of Trump’s logorrhea of lies, insults, complaints, and criticisms. Here is what she said in response to his complaint about Democratic congressional oversight, which he’s now under, amounting to “unlimited presidential harassment”:
I always think that whatever the president says about us, he’s projecting his own unruliness. He’s a projector and that’s what he’s about.
(HuffPost, February 8, 2019)
But here is why, instead of joining the media in hailing Pelosi, I feel obliged to simply acknowledge her:
The psychopathology afoot here is called projection. It is defined by people attributing to others traits, faults, and blame that inhere in themselves. And it explains almost every insult Trump has hurled at his opponents throughout this presidential campaign.
So when you hear him calling other people crooked, insecure, weak, beholden to special interests, liars, etc., be mindful that he’s just revealing self-conscious truths about himself, dimwittedly.
(“Forget the Clinton Foundation. Shut Down the Trump Organization!” The iPINIONS Journal, August 26, 2016)
For example, nobody complains more about fake news than Trump. Yet nobody is a bigger purveyor of fake news than he.
Trump is the Pied Piper of a new Age of Ignorance, which manifests in everything from voters blithely eating up fake news to parents willfully buying into anti-vax propaganda. The latter is especially noteworthy because of the deadly consequences it portends for their children, as well as those of other more informed and responsible parents.
(“Despite Trump, this Migrant Caravan Must Be Stopped!” The iPINIONS Journal, October 22, 2018)
Of course, I am all too mindful of this:
Complaining about President Trump’s hypocrisy is rather like complaining about a prostitute’s promiscuity.
(“Trump’s Hypocrisy on Human Rights: Cuba vs. Qatar,” The iPINIONS Journal, June 16, 2017)
In fact, the only thing more hypocritical than Trump complaining about presidential harassment is Republican leaders like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell parroting his complaints.
After all, these very same Republicans spent the eight years of Obama’s presidency trying to tar and feather him with all kinds of trumped-up investigations. But nobody was more harassing in this respect than Trump – who spent much of that time acting as the grand wizard of the Birther movement.
Meanwhile, Obama was arguably the most honest and honorable person ever elected president of the United States. By contrast, Trump is undeniably the most corrupt and contemptible person ever elected; ergo, the democratic imperative to investigate him like no other president has ever been investigated.
Yet Republican leaders are twisting themselves into political pretzels trying to defend him. This, in a vain attempt to deflect from the legitimate reasons Democrats and Trump’s own justice department are investigating him up the wazoo. Only the willfully blind cannot see the Nixonian fate that awaits him.
Therefore, that these banana Republicans continue to defend him is just a small indication of how thoroughly Trump has cuckolded them and taken over their party.
But you know Trump’s Republican minions have lost all respect when even folks at Fox News are calling out their hypocrisy. Here is what anchor Chris Wallace said last Friday on that network about their Trump-centered whining:
[I find] it kind of rich that Republicans are so outraged that there would be this kind of a hearing of the other party’s president and administration. You know, it’s not like Republicans sat on their hands when Barack Obama was president. …
That’s the way it works.
Alas, Republicans have shown a cult-like willingness not just to countenance Trump projecting lies, insults, complaints, and criticisms but to abet him in doing so. The hypocrisy, if not the illegality, inherent in this is so egregious, it’s unpardonable … and a national disgrace.
Related commentaries:
SOTU spectacle…
Projecting…
Despite Trump…
Nixonian…
Trump’s Republican minions…