“Lying is second nature to him. More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.” -- Tony Schwartz, regretting ghostwriting for Donald Trump “He (Trump) lied strategically. He had a complete lack of conscience about it.” -- Tony Schwartz (1a) Lying to US farmers that he opened up European Market. Mary Papenfuss reported that "other than soybeans, agricultural products are off the table, the European Commission says." The following is full text of Mary Papenfuss's July 27, 2018 news report headlined "Trump Boasted To Farmers He Opened European Market. Europe: No, He Didn’t." at https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entr...ltural-trade-deal_us_5b5bd221e4b0de86f4974cd2 (Begin text) President Donald Trump said in Iowa on Thursday that he just opened up the European market to U.S. farmers. One problem: Europe disagrees. “We’re opening things up,” Trump said in Dubuque (video above). “But the biggest one of all happened yesterday ... the EU .... We just opened up Europe for you farmers. You’re not going to be too angry with Trump, I can tell you. You were essentially restricted. You had barriers that really made it impossible for farm products to go in ... you have just gotten yourself one big market that really essentially never existed.” The European Union’s take was very different. “On agriculture, I think we’ve been very clear on that — that agriculture is out of the scope of these discussions,” European Commission spokeswoman Mina Andreeva told reporters in Brussels on Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported. Other than what is “explicitly mentioned” in the agreement, “we are not negotiating about agricultural products,” she said. “When you read the joint statement ... you will see no mention of agriculture as such; you will see a mention of farmers and a mention of soybeans, which are part of the discussions, and we will follow up [on] that,” Andreeva added. Trump’s boast appears to be an overselling of the agreement he reached with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, which was announced at the White House on Wednesday. The men agreed to a truce in the confrontation over trade while the two sides negotiate toward common goals. Those include “zero tariffs” and to “reduce barriers and increase trade in services, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, medical products, as well as soybeans.” Trump hailed it as a “breakthrough agreement,” while Juncker said it was a “good and instructive meeting.” The U.S. “heavily insisted to insert the whole field of agricultural products” in the negotiations, Juncker later told reporters, according to the Journal. “We refused that because I don’t have a mandate and that’s a very sensitive issue in Europe.” But U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told a Senate committee Thursday that “we are negotiating about agriculture, period.” In Dubuque, Trump described the agreement as “no tariffs, no nothing, free trade.” He said he told the Europeans: “Do me a favor: Would you go out to the farms in Iowa ... would you buy a lot of soybeans right now?” (End text)
Well said. I look forward to more postings from you. It will be much better if you can expand your argument with explanation and details.
There are several articles in today's news.. There's a bottleneck in getting crude to the refineries.. They need to build pipelines.
Please list all the available links to the articles. Instead of getting crude to the refineries, it is more crucial for Trump to build pipelines or “soylines” that bring soybeans to all European countries.
2. Paul Waldman is a senior writer with The American Prospect magazine and a blogger for The Washington Post. His writing has appeared in dozens of newspapers, magazines, and web sites, and he is the author or co-author of four books on media and politics. The following are excerpts from his March 10, 2016 article headlined "Why Donald Trump's brazen lies overwhelm the press". (Begin excerpts) ...there are liars, and then there's Donald Trump. He may have an inflated opinion of himself, but when it comes to lying, the man has truly reached a level no one else can approach. If you've watched Trump at all, you've probably had this experience: First he says something outlandish ("If we negotiated the price of drugs, we'd save $300 billion a year"), and you think "That can't possibly be true." Then he moves on to something even more bizarre ("We have the highest taxes anywhere in the world"), and you say, "Now I know that's not true." But he keeps going, offering one ridiculous and false claim after another, until you're left shaking your head in wonder. Trump's lies come in many different forms. Some are those that are clearly wrong, and which it's almost certain he knows are wrong, as when he says The Art of the Deal is "the number one selling business book of all time" (not even close). Some are things he seems to have heard somewhere that are false; of course, repeating such a story doesn't become an intentional lie until you know it's false but insist it's true. That's the case with things like Trump's bogus story about thousands of Muslims celebrating the fall of the Twin Towers on rooftops in Jersey City, or with his repeated story that the 9/11 hijackers sent their wives and girlfriends back to Saudi Arabia from the U.S. two days before the attacks (only two of the 19 hijackers were married, one had a girlfriend, and none of those three were in the United States). Others might be put down to being just wild exaggerations, as when he claims that all the polls show him beating Hillary Clinton in a general election (nope). But the sheer volume of Trump's lies may, paradoxically, protect him from the kind of condemnation he ought to be getting. His unique style was on majestic display at the press conference he gave Tuesday night after another round of primaries, in which he set out to defend himself against Mitt Romney's charge that many of his branding ventures — like Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, and Trump Magazine — have gone out of business. It was complete with visual displays as phony as Trump's claims. Romney "talked about the water company" said Trump, showing his fantastic, luxurious water. But Romney said nothing about a water company, and it appears that Trump's water is made by this company in Connecticut, and then they slap a "Trump" label on it and sell it at his resorts. "We have Trump Steaks," he said, pointing to a platter full of steaks that had been brought out for the occasion. But Trump Steaks have been off the market for a decade; the steaks at the press conference were still in wrappers indicating they came from a meat company called Bush Brothers. "We have Trump Magazine," Trump said, holding up not the actual Trump Magazine, which stopped publishing in 2009, but something called The Jewel of Palm Beach, which he apparently has printed up and passed out to promote his Mar-a-Lago resort. "He mentioned Trump Vodka," Trump said, going on to explain how he owns a working winery (actually true!), but not saying anything about the vodka, which indeed went bust in 2011 (Jonathan Ellis explains all this, with pictures). What should reporters do when they're confronted with this kind of blizzard of baloney? There aren't any easy answers. Though some publications employ fact checkers who pick out certain claims they think are meaningful enough to investigate at length, if you're covering a Trump rally or press conference and you decide to explain all the things he said that were false, that would make up the entirety of your story and there would be no time or space to address anything else. And if a reporter for a major news organization described this matter accurately — that Trump is an unusually enthusiastic liar whose falsehoods come in such quantity that they're difficult to keep up with — she'd be accused of abandoning her objectivity. The real genius of Trump's mendacity lies in its brazenness. One of the assumptions behind the fact-checking enterprise is that politicians are susceptible to being shamed: If they lie, you can expose the lie and then they'll be less likely to repeat it. After all, nobody wants to be tarred as a liar. But what happens when you're confronted with a politician who is utterly without shame? You can reveal where he's lied, explain all the facts, and try as hard as you can to inoculate the public against his falsehoods. But by the time you've done that, he has already told 10 more lies. "A little hyperbole never hurts," Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal. "People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular." He seems to believe that what matters isn't the truth, but whether you lie with enough bravado. And so far, he's largely getting away with it. (End excerpts) Source: http://theweek.com/articles/611581/why-donald-trumps-brazen-lies-overwhelm-press
3. The following is full text of the "Joint U.S.-EU Statement following President Juncker's visit to the White House". It was issued by the European Commission in Washington on 25 July 2018. (Begin text) We met today in Washington, D.C. to launch a new phase in the relationship between the United States and the European Union – a phase of close friendship, of strong trade relations in which both of us will win, of working better together for global security and prosperity, and of fighting jointly against terrorism. The United States and the European Union together count more than 830 million citizens and more than 50 percent of global GDP. If we team up, we can make our planet a better, more secure, and more prosperous place. Already today, the United States and the European Union have a $1 trillion bilateral trade relationship – the largest economic relationship in the world. We want to further strengthen this trade relationship to the benefit of all American and European citizens. This is why we agreed today, first of all, to work together toward zero tariffs, zero non-tariff barriers, and zero subsidies on non-auto industrial goods. We will also work to reduce barriers and increase trade in services, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, medical products, as well as soybeans. This will open markets for farmers and workers, increase investment, and lead to greater prosperity in both the United States and the European Union. It will also make trade fairer and more reciprocal. Secondly, we agreed today to strengthen our strategic cooperation with respect to energy. The European Union wants to import more liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the United States to diversify its energy supply. Thirdly, we agreed today to launch a close dialogue on standards in order to ease trade, reduce bureaucratic obstacles, and slash costs. Fourthly, we agreed today to join forces to protect American and European companies better from unfair global trade practices. We will therefore work closely together with like-minded partners to reform the WTO and to address unfair trading practices, including intellectual property theft, forced technology transfer, industrial subsidies, distortions created by state owned enterprises, and overcapacity. We decided to set up immediately an Executive Working Group of our closest advisors to carry this joint agenda forward. In addition, it will identify short-term measures to facilitate commercial exchanges and assess existing tariff measures. While we are working on this, we will not go against the spirit of this agreement, unless either party terminates the negotiations. We also want to resolve the steel and aluminum tariff issues and retaliatory tariffs. (End text) P.S. Please note what European Commission spokeswoman Mina Andreeva told reporters in Brussels on Friday, July 27, 2018: “When you read the joint statement ... you will see no mention of agriculture as such; you will see a mention of farmers and a mention of soybeans, which are part of the discussions, and we will follow up [on] that.” Source: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_STATEMENT-18-4687_en.htm
4. Matt Apuzzo is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter based in Washington. He has covered law enforcement and security matters for more than a decade. A graduate of Colby College, he joined The New York Times in 2014 after 11 years with The Associated Press. He teaches journalism at Georgetown University and once successfully argued a motion from the audience in federal court. Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent who joined The Times in 2015 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on Donald Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. Before joining The Times as a campaign correspondent, Ms. Haberman worked as a political reporter at Politico, from 2010 to 2015. She previously worked at other publications, including The New York Post and The New York Daily News. The following are excerpts from an article, by Matt Apuzzo and Maggie Haberman on July 25, 2018, under the headline "How Michael Cohen’s Audio Clip Unraveled Trump’s False Statements". (Begin excerpts) WASHINGTON — Just before Election Day, when The Wall Street Journal uncovered a secret deal by The National Enquirer to buy the silence of a former Playboy model who said she had an affair with Donald J. Trump, his campaign issued a flat denial. “We have no knowledge of any of this,” Mr. Trump’s spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, told the newspaper. She said the claim of an affair was “totally untrue.” Then last week, when The New York Times revealed the existence of a recorded conversation about the very payment Mr. Trump denied knowing about, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, described the recording as “exculpatory” — suggesting it would actually help Mr. Trump if it became public. Finally, the tape has become public. And it revealed the statements by Ms. Hicks and Mr. Giuliani to be false. The recording, which was broadcast by CNN late Tuesday night, shows Mr. Trump was directly involved in talks about whether to pay The Enquirer for the rights to the woman’s story. The recording, and the repeated statements it contradicts, is a stark example of how Mr. Trump and his aides have used falsehoods as a shield against tough questions and unflattering coverage. Building upon his repeated cry of “fake news,” he told supporters this week not to believe the news. “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” the president added.... The tape that surfaced Tuesday concerned the former model, Karen McDougal, who says she began a nearly yearlong affair with Mr. Trump in 2006. Shortly before the 2016 presidential election, she sold her story for $150,000 to The Enquirer. But the tabloid, which was supportive of Mr. Trump, sat on the story, a practice known as catch and kill. It effectively silenced Ms. McDougal for the remainder of the campaign. The legal implications of the taped conversation for Mr. Trump are unclear. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating whether Mr. Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, committed bank fraud or violated campaign finance laws by arranging payments to silence women critical of Mr. Trump. They are also eyeing the role of the Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., as they discern whether the payment to Ms. McDougal represented an illegal, coordinated campaign expenditure. The recording is potentially significant because it places Ms. McDougal in the context of the presidential campaign. Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen talk polling, surrogates, fending off journalists, and, finally, whether to buy Ms. McDougal’s rights from A.M.I. The recording was among 12 handed over to prosecutors from a trove of Mr. Cohen’s material that F.B.I. agents seized in April. It is the only recording of substance between Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the material. Others include Mr. Cohen speaking to figures in broadcast news, the people said. One captures a lengthy conversation Mr. Cohen had with the CNN host Chris Cuomo, The Journal reported on Wednesday. The conversation involved “the usual discussion of politics and media,” said a lawyer for Mr. Cohen, Lanny J. Davis, adding that Mr. Cohen had a habit of recording conversations “in lieu of taking notes,” and had not intended to ever make it public. In the recording about American Media and the McDougal deal, Mr. Trump does not appear surprised to hear about the arrangement. Mr. Cohen describes the agreement with “our friend David,” a reference to the company’s chief executive, David J. Pecker. The tape surfaced as part of a widening rift between Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen, his once-trusted adviser. Mr. Cohen has all but advertised his willingness to cooperate with federal prosecutors, an arrangement that could unearth many of the secrets that he helped bury in a decade of work as Mr. Trump’s fixer. No such cooperation deal has been reached, and prosecutors typically do not make such arrangements until they have finished reviewing the evidence they have collected. The tape also shows how enmeshed the Trump Organization had become in politics and the effort to protect Mr. Trump’s image. Mr. Cohen can be heard telling Mr. Trump that he had consulted with the company’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, “when it comes time for the financing” of the payments to the Enquirer’s parent company. “Wait a sec, what financing?” Mr. Trump is heard saying. “Well, I’ll have to pay him something,” Mr. Cohen then says. Mr. Weisselberg was also involved in structuring Mr. Cohen’s reimbursements of more than $400,000 after he parted ways with the Trump Organization. Those reimbursements are said to have partly covered the $130,000 he spent to silence a pornographic film actress named Stephanie Clifford, who goes by the stage name Stormy Daniels. She also claimed a previous affair with Mr. Trump that he has denied. Like the deal involving Ms. McDougal, statements from Mr. Trump and his representatives about Ms. Clifford fell apart under legal scrutiny, in that case as part of the suit Ms. Clifford filed to have her agreement — drafted by Mr. Cohen directly — nullified. Around the time that Ms. Clifford filed her lawsuit in early March, Ms. Sanders said “there was no knowledge of any payments from the president” when reporters pressed her about it. Asked a month later whether he knew about it, Mr. Trump offered a flat “no,” adding, “You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen.” Mr. Giuliani directly contradicted the president a few weeks later, telling the Fox News host Sean Hannity that “sometime after the campaign is over,” Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen “set up a reimbursement, $35,000 a month, out of his personal family account.” He said at the time that he believed Mr. Trump only learned about Mr. Cohen’s payment to Ms. Clifford after Mr. Cohen initially made it. When the recording of Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen discussing the A.M.I. deal with Ms. McDougal surfaced last week, Mr. Trump’s lawyers drafted a transcript and circulated it to reporters. In their version, Mr. Trump told Mr. Cohen “don’t pay with cash” and then says, “check.” The transcript, however, is based on widely circulated audio easily accessible with the click of a mouse, as Mr. Cohen’s legal team noted on Wednesday. Mr. Trump’s team manufactured a dialogue to make it more favorable for their client. “They have been getting away with saying that a lie is the truth and don’t believe the media,” said Mr. Davis, Mr. Cohen’s lawyer. “But they walked into a trap here because a tape is a tape. It’s a fact. If you’re for Donald Trump, don’t believe me. I’m a Democrat. Believe your own ears.” Repeated screenings of the tape do not clearly reveal Mr. Trump saying the words “don’t pay with,” an omission that would entirely change the meaning of his comment. That creates a chasm between what is heard on the tape, and what Mr. Trump’s aides say is heard on the tape. (End excerpts) Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/us/politics/trump-michael-cohen-recording.html
5. Andrew Michael Sullivan (born 10 August 1963) is an English-born American author, editor, and blogger. Sullivan is a conservative political commentator, a former editor of The New Republic, and the author or editor of six books. He was a pioneer of the political blog, starting his in 2000. He eventually moved his blog to various publishing platforms, including Time, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and finally an independent subscription-based format. He announced his retirement from blogging in 2015. Sullivan has been a writer-at-large at New York since 2016. The following are excerpts from Andrew Sullivan's July 27, 2018 article headlined "Portrait of the President As a Con Man". (Begin excerpts) The leaked tape recording of Michael Cohen and Donald Trump discussing how to handle the payoff to silence yet another extracurricular paramour, Karen McDougal, is more important, it seems to me, than has been generally acknowledged. It’s only a shade under three minutes long. But unlike the Billy Bush tape, Trump is not performing or bragging or trying to charm someone he doesn’t know that well. He’s at work, with an intimate, trusted wingman, every single guard down. It really feels like the actual Trump, the man behind the curtain. And this Trump is quite clearly in charge. He’s not some addled 70-something, delegating large swathes of responsibility for day-to-day operations to underlings. He’s clearly aware of everything that’s going on: “Let me know what’s happening, okay?” he says to someone — Pam (Bondi)? — on the phone at first. He talks about how some issue will blow over: “I think this goes away quickly … in two weeks; it’s fine.” He then asks Cohen, “Can we use him anymore?” referring to an Evangelical pastor, and Cohen says absolutely. Then they briefly discuss “the financing” for the National Enquirer’s capture and withholding of the McDougal story. “So, what do we got to pay for this? $150?” Trump asks at one point, meaning $150,000. The question of “cash” is raised by Trump (the precise wording is hard to make out from the audio), and Cohen strongly rules it out: “No, no, no.” What this tiny glimpse into reality reveals is something quite simple. It’s not that it’s a shock that Trump has been lying about this incident from the very beginning. That has long been clear. But there’s something about listening to his voice acknowledging this in such a breezy, matter-of-fact tone that exposes the purity of the cynicism behind the lies. “We have no knowledge of any of this,” Trump spokesperson Hope Hicks, had, after all, originally told The Wall Street Journal when it broke the story days before the 2016 election. The idea that Trump had had an affair at all, let alone organized hush money to the National Enquirer, was “totally untrue.” And yet here, as the curtain is pulled back, we hear Trump himself figuring out how to finance its cover-up. This is not a man embarrassed by something unusual in his private life, lying defensively in a panic. It’s a world-weary operator in sleaze and outright deception, dealing with an item of everyday business. The euphemisms — “info,” “financing,” “our friend David,” etc. — are those of people who know they’re doing something shady. He even talks of “using” a religious-right figure. It’s the tape of a con man, discussing the con with an underling in a kind of consigliere code. And this revelation is therefore dangerous. It demonstrates that Trump is, in fact, just another crooked pol — and does so in his own voice.... Con men usually know that a con has a life span, and not a long one. At some point, it will collapse because it is, in fact, bullshit. By then, the best con men have made the sale — think of “Trump University” — and moved on. They also know that keeping the suckers sealed off from other sources of contrary information is essential until the deal is done. You have to maintain a fiction relentlessly, dismiss or delegitimize external information that might get your marks to think differently, and constantly make the sale. You have to humor and flatter and bullshit all the time, until you’ve sealed the deal. And Trump is really, really good at this. In fact, it’s his chief skill, along with his instinct for the easy mark and another human being’s vulnerable spot. It has worked many times before. It’s at the root of his entire shady business career. His problem now, however, is that this is the biggest of all cons, if you’re playing at a presidential level, and is also the longest. It has to be sustainable for at least four years. And that’s an extremely long time to keep it alive. This is why, it seems to me, Trump tweets so often and so aggressively. It’s his chief mechanism for keeping his dupes under his spell, for sustaining the narrative of the con while reality tugs at it. He’s making the sale every news cycle of every day because the alternative is the whole thing crashing to the ground. It’s also why he keeps holding rallies. You need that kind of mass crowd hysteria to sustain a con — “America Is Great Again!” — that might otherwise be fraying at the edges. It’s why he lambastes the media. Their role in undercutting the con — in presenting the arguments against it, in raising suspicions about the con man himself — is deeply destabilizing to the project. And it’s why he has to lie, and lie with greater and greater intensity and frequency. And sure enough, the rate of Trump’s lies is accelerating, as the con ages. All six of the last six weeks rank in the top ten most dishonest of his presidency, as the indefatigable Daniel Dale has noted. Last Tuesday, Trump actually made the subtext text, in a speech to a Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention: “Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening … Just stick with us, don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news.” Some have analogized this to Orwell’s vision of totalitarianism. But it is not as sophisticated as that. It’s just a con man getting a little rattled, as his trade war is beginning to wreak havoc in the Midwest. When you have brazenly declared that such wars are easy to win, and agriculture in the heartland is nonetheless reeling, and manufacturing is increasingly jittery about the cost of imported steel, what else are you going to do? Well, you can bribe the farmers with some $12 billion. Or ask companies and their workers to be patient. But some in the middle of the country will still start doubting — and his polling in three Midwest swing states that gave him the presidency is now slipping. He’s at 36 percent approval in Wisconsin and Michigan in the latest NBC poll, and 38 percent in Minnesota. That VFW appeal — and his visit to Illinois and Dubuque, Iowa, yesterday — is a sign, it seems to me, of a little desperation. Desperate is insisting that what is clearly the word would — from the tape and the tone and the sentence structure of his Helsinki press conference — is actually the word wouldn’t. Desperate is responding to the Carter Page FISA documents by insisting that they say the opposite of what they actually say. Desperate is insisting that when the president said no directly to a reporter asking whether he believed that the Russians were still meddling in American democracy, he was actually not answering the question, even as he was looking at the journalist when he said it. Desperate is banning a CNN reporter from a press conference because she had previously asked difficult reality-based questions about Michael Cohen — and then quibbling over the term ban. Desperate is a sudden Obama-like truce with the E.U. on trade. Desperate is the attempt by some House Republicans to impeach Rod Rosenstein, a move that has not even been cheered by the far-right media, and that is swiftly deflating. Desperate is doubling down on the “witch-hunt hoax,” while the chief money guy for the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, gets a subpoena, and Michael Cohen’s lawyer says of his client, who knows far too much, “He has hit the reset button; he’s made a turn — to be on his own, speaking the truth.” More desperate still is Rudy Giuliani saying of Michael Cohen last night, after Cohen told CNN that Trump did indeed know in advance of the meeting in Trump Tower with an agent of the Russian government: “He’s been lying all week; he’s been lying for years.” No, this is not an unraveling. But the con is definitely fraying badly. And it is not going to get easier to keep patching it up as time goes steadily by. (End excerpts) Source: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligence...n-portrait-of-the-president-as-a-con-man.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Sullivan
6. Jack Holmes is Associate Editor for News & Politics at Esquire.com, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P. Pierce. He also does a dash of sports and some feature writing. His work has appeared in New York magazine and The Daily Beast. The following are excerpts from Jack Holmes' June 15, 2018 article headlined "This Is the Quintessential Trump Lie" with subheading "Shameless, easily verifiable, and rooted in the notion that imaginary people are telling him things". (Begin excerpts) ....So it was Wednesday evening, when the president explained why he was so eager to bring home the remains of Americans killed in the Korean War as part of his summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. This was surely an admirable goal, and a fine accomplishment from a meeting whose concrete results have otherwise been questioned. But it wasn't enough for Trump to simply savor this victory—he had to say something wildly untrue along with it: This is truly a vintage Trumpian lie. As many have pointed out already, assuming the parents of a Korean War veteran were 18 when they were born, those parents would be a minimum of 101 years old today. More likely, they'd be at least 110. The idea that multiple 110-year-old people came up to Donald Trump on the campaign trail to ask him to bring home the remains of their son killed on North Korean soil 63 years prior is just absurd. It's a stirring story, a noble enough sentiment, and, in this case, completely nuts. The president is just saying things again. In that way, this is a quintessential Trumpian lie: totally shameless, easily verifiable as false, and rooted in the notion that "many people"—who are never defined further, and who you'll never be able to find—are telling the president something that he just happens to agree with himself. How many times in this troubled period in our nation's history have we heard how "many people are saying" something about Donald Trump? The possibly more worrying thing here is that there was not all that much to immediately gain from the lie, while the related issue was already sort of a victory for the president. It points to the lying being a truly pathological issue, an instinctive mode of operation for a dangerously impulsive man. It's not breaking any new ground to say it, but this is a problematic attribute for the leader of the world's most powerful country. (End excerpts) Source: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a21526163/trump-korean-war-parents-lie/
