Gaslighting is a sin, not a strategy

Demonstrators held up these signs outside of a fundraiser for President Biden in East Hampton, New York, on June 30, 2024 (Bloomberg)

Gaslighting is a sin, not a strategy, and when employed as such by the side claiming “good man” as the spine of their brand, it destroys the brand and everything associated with it.

The current White House position is untruthful, untenable and insulting. It demands obedience to a lie, and when I posted this many years ago, it wasn’t for the purposes of escaping one cult for another. No thanks.

The White House team that wanted the debate that 51 million people watched now contend that the issue is people talking about what they saw, not in fact what they witnessed and the obvious consequences.

Whatever this absurdism should be called it is important to remember that, while Eva Braun danced the night away in the Führer‘s bunker, she couldn’t hear the shells and fire when Dresden burned. All that came later when the inevitable came to the doorstep. It always does. Reality cannot be outrun.

I have said often that the most delicate flower in the world is the male ego, and there is no bloom more fragile than the rancid Trump flower. Yet, President Biden seems intent on competing in a category where derangement and selfishness need no more representation. Watching two octogenarians argue about their golf scores, handicaps and ability to schlep a bag was a moment of incandescent national weakness, decay and moral rot. It was a moment when most Americans shared a deep anguish about the loss of dignity on display. The danger ahead is certain to arrive with a catastrophic thunderclap — unless the current course is changed.  

Donald Trump’s unfitness is manifestly clear, but his menace stands completely unopposed. The White House has proved adept at exactly one thing during the 2024 campaign: it is gaslighting and bullying truth tellers who demand a strategy for victory against a vicious cause that is winning, and getting ready to vandalize every meaningful democratic norm, law and tradition for the cause of their power and wealth.

The rights of America’s women to their privacy and bodies deserves a fierce defense from the cynical onslaught of political and religious extremism bearing down on them, but President Biden was unable to formulate a coherent sentence. All the while, Trump steamrolled him with a stew of insanities, inanities, lies, revisionism and denialism.

Even January 6 was a bridge too far for the commander in chief to explain — let alone confront the insurrectionist in chief about it. Donald Trump slandered America, slandered Joe Biden, and assaulted the truth. He was successful in doing so because Joe Biden is a declining 81-year-old man who couldn’t fight back — let alone take the fight forward. It was an appalling and unnecessary spectacle.

Here are some thoughts about the immense national crisis at hand.

The first rule of holes is simple, yet profound. When in a hole, first, stop digging.

The spectacle of gaslighting that played out on the Sunday morning shows was shameful, but also antagonistic. When you tell people that they didn’t see what they saw plainly, it is a form of “f@%* you-ism” that stirs contempt, defiance and anger that will blow back with an exponential return. This would be obvious to a more competent political team, but the record is clear.

Two cases in point are Dana Bash’s interviews with both Nancy Pelosi and James Clyburn:

The Biden team is running on “Bidenomics,” a word they invented to describe the economy about which the American people despair and disapprove. While they are no longer using the term because it was panned, and rightly so, the president insists that the economy is the best it has ever been with no vision or possibility of inclusion for the 40 percent of the country that doesn’t have $400 cash available for an emergency. Of course there was no room to talk about artificial intelligence, poverty, science, discovery, ethics, liberty or any complex subject between the banality of questioning and idiocy of so many answers.

After a Sunday morning of gaslighting the American people, the Bidenistas have made it clear that they are digging in, deeper and deeper and deeper.

As the party official told Winston in George Orwell’s “1984:”

Here is what the Biden political team has accomplished: strategically, they are surrounded like Custer and Von Paulus, checkmated by their own arrogance and close-minded cloistering. Make no mistake, the Biden team is fueled by resentment, grievance and self-interest every bit as much as the Trump team, to whom they have handed the issue of honesty (!).

Honesty. Trump is the most prolific liar in American history, but also the most honest. There is nothing guarded or hidden. He simply is. Who is telling the truth about Biden’s fitness? Trump has been put in the position of being a truth teller on this particular issue by the people who are lying about what 51 million eye witnesses clearly saw. The price of being caught in the act of gaslighting is being tuned out when you call the other side dishonest — even when it is led by the most prolific liar in US history. Quite an achievement.

What is Trump? Is he a threat or a prop?

Clearly, the Bidens view him as a prop that justifies the broken promise of an elderly man who wants more power under the lunacy that only he can beat Trump, when in fact, he is the only sure loser against him not named Kamala Harris in the Democratic Party. If Trump were a real threat a sense of duty would compel a defense against it that was able, competent and effective because losing would be unthinkable. Instead, Biden plods on like an aged king or pope or decrepit Supreme Court justice.

What we are witnessing is an abomination, and it is hideously wrong. The just released CBS/YouGov poll found that, following the debate, 72 per cent of registered voters do not think that Biden has the mental and cognitive health to serve as president. The same percentage believe that he should not be running for president — a nine point increase since February.

Moreover, staying in the race guarantees Donald Trump will win the election in November, and most likely with a MAGA US House, US Senate, and a majority of governors and state legislative chambers. Donald Trump will claim a “people’s mandate’ to inflict Project 2025 on the country that will be radically changed very quickly as it is “Orbanized” into a fascistic enterprise benefiting its patrons, disciples and functionaries who get to nibble at the leader’s feast.

A small group of self-interested people have no right to impose Trump on us through selfishness and arrogance.

This is a moment where courage counts. I applaud Congressman Jamie Raskin, who said the following today:

Raskin is a true patriot, who refused to lie and gaslight. Instead, he talked about the crisis honestly, and with his typical integrity.

Who else is going to step forward?

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