The King of Lies
By Carlos Alberto Montaner
Donald Trump has tried to sell me golf balls signed by himself, books, hats, photos and countless other things. I have never answered him. It must be an extraordinary business. They multiply the costs by 10 or 15. Some joker included me among his supporters months ago, and since then, they send me that junk from Trump’s office, and the former president invites me to some public events, as if I were important to his group, with the assurance that he will make some genuinely momentous remarks.
Republican Senator Marco Rubio was not wrong when, during the 2016 campaign, he said that Trump was a con artist or a con man. It was an accurate depiction. Trump is a man who makes you feel important to sell you things that border on the scam – a degree from a ghost university, an overpriced apartment in Manhattan, or a humble book of which he appears as the author but that was actually written by a ghost writer, and that Trump has not had time to read. His niece, psychologist Mary L. Trump, affirms that her uncle has the nine characteristics of psychopaths suffering from narcissism, to the extent that she wrote a book on Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.
Now it is evident that Trump’s niece was not exaggerating. Trump was about to cause a civil war in the US, or that the fight in the Capitol spilled over into the streets. It would have been enough for that to happen that Vice President Mike Pence had paid attention to the crazy theory of John Eastman, professor of Constitutional Law, promoted from the White House. Eastman said that the refusal of the VP to certify a winner in the Electoral College was enough for the election to be decided by Congress, according to one vote per state, in such a way that this maneuver favored Trump. All told, Trump was backed by 74 million votes. It was true that Biden had been elected by 81 million voters, and by the majority of the Electoral College, therefore Trump had to cling to the hypothesis that “he was cheated in the election counts and recounts.”
As in all stories, there are heroes and villains. The main hero is Mike Pence, an earnest Republican, former governor of Indiana, who added to the Trump-Pence ticket the certainty that there would be at least one person in the White House capable of responding to the conservative Christian group, given that Donald Trump was not reliable on sex-related issues.
Pence did not like the inconsiderate pressure that Trump was putting on him, and decided to consult with Dan Quayle, the only living countryman from Indiana who had been vice president of the nation, a Republican like him, and who had the task of verifying the election victory of Democrat Bill Clinton and his VP Al Gore.
Dan Quayle was adamant. The only thing that could be done was to ratify the electoral results officially collected by the election boards. It was an almost symbolic ceremony. Donald Trump shouldn’t have even asked him to break the law. Both Quayle and Pence are lawyers, and both are graduates from Indiana University’s McKinney School of Law, although they were a generation apart. (They even shared some teachers) They could not invoke the dubious ignorance of the law. It was very clear in the papers explaining the transfer of authority in case there was a discrepancy.
Trump doesn’t care at all about truth or lies. In Maricopa, Arizona, there was a recount of votes. It cost nine million dollars. When Trump is reminded of that audit’s outcome, he asserts, more or less derisively, that “Biden doesn’t look like he got 81 million votes.” The shameful thing is the consistent lie. To question the electoral results because it fits perfectly with the premise that “I was cheated” and not with the empirical verification of the facts. He is guided, and his supporters are guided, by the simple acceptance of “impressions.”
I do not believe in the possibility that this gentleman rectifies and accepts that he has made a mistake. What surprises me is the echo that he finds among the Republicans. Up to 70% of Republicans believe that there was fraud, and that Joe Biden occupies a position that he does not deserve. Among Hispanics, the Cuban ethnic group, or those of Cuban origin, even those who have not yet got rid of the saltwater, because they have been in exile for a short time, show the greatest affinity for Donald Trump, fundamentally for opposing Obama’s simplism, and because of racism. They don’t consider the damage he does to the overall image of the United States.
