Handing the Mic to David Corn February 8, 2026February 7, 2026 But first . . . The DNC has just launched Local Listeners, a program to engage infrequent voters — who voted in 2020 but not 2024 — in key battleground districts early in the cycle using a listening-first approach. The goal is to contact more than a million in Q1. Already, more than 2,000 volunteers have signed up to participate and 500+ joined the first session in January. Become a Local Listener! Sign up for the Volunteer Training Series HERE. And just for fun . . . Prescient Little Marco (90 seconds). Never gets old. And now . . . David Corn: When I traveled in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s, I was struck by how many Russians blithely accepted that they were living in a truthless society in which propaganda was oxygen. But after decades of Five-Year Plans and a never-ending stream of glorious-revolution bullshit, it was hard to blame them. A saying that’s been attributed to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—which he likely never uttered or wrote—captured this attitude: << We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying. >> I wonder if the United States is slipping into such a fog. The Donald Trump regime, of course, is predicated on lies. His 2024 campaign was a crusade of disinformation. Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs; criminal immigrant gangs have taken over entire cities; public schools were performing gender affirmation procedures; Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were purposefully allowing fentanyl to be smuggled into the United States. And Trump, as you might recall, was clocked by the Washington Post during his first term as spewing more than 30,000 falsehoods and lies. It’s no news flash that he’s prevaricating non-stop. But what’s most worrisome is how brazen he and the fellow fibbers in his gang are—as if there were absolutely no concern about being caught or found out. And not just regarding lying. They’re also brazen when it comes to racism, abuse of power, and corruption. In the quaint days before Trump, lying presidents and lying elected officials tried to make it seem they were not lying. Corrupt presidents and corrupt elected officials tried to make it seem they were not corrupt. With Trump and his banditos, there are no such games of pretend. It leads to a disturbing dynamic, in which Trump and his lieutenants display their atrociousness to such an extent that it can lead to inurement. We know their actions are outrageous, they know their actions are outrageous, we know they know, they know we know they know—and this circle swallows itself. Nothing changes. Trump denies he’s vengefully weaponizing the Justice Department to take down his enemies. Yet we see this clearly happening in multiple instances, with the prosecutions of James Comey, Letitia James, and Adam Schiff and the criminal investigations of others, including former special counsel Jack Smith and former CIA director John Brennan. These cases have been mounted over the objections of professional prosecutors and handled by political hacks—a true sign they are flagrant abuses of power. Yet Trump and his lackeys insist this is merely the Justice Department doing its job by the book. There has never been a more obvious perversion of the DOJ. They know we know. Trump denies he’s a racist. Yet he has a long history of racist statements and acts. I don’t need to run though all that again. But a few days ago, when he was on Dan Bongino’s podcast—to which the former FBI deputy director has returned to resume his conspiracy-mongering career—Trump said, “Minnesota is a mess. There’s something in the water up there…I won the three times but I got no credit for it…It’s a rigged state. Really rigged badly with the Somalians, and the Somalians and the theft…These are people that don’t work…We gotta get ’em out, most of them. And it’s most of them. Ninety-two percent don’t work…Many of them drive Mercedes-Benzes.” In December, he exclaimed, Somalis “are garbage” and “contribute nothing. I don’t want ’em in our country…We don’t want ’em in our country…Let ’em go back to where they came from.” Pure, unadulterated racism. On Thursday night, Trump put up on his money-losing social media site a meme depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes—which was later removed, though the White House defended it. And the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Labor have been routinely posting memes and messages that promote images and slogans used by white supremacists. In modern times there has never been such undisguised and explicit racism purposefully propagated by an administration. They know we know. Trump engages in the most overt corruption. His wife accepted a $40 million payment from billionaire Jeff Bezos and Amazon for a mediocre (at best) film—a way-above-market-value licensing fee—while Bezos and Amazon have multiple interests before the government that Trump controls. (Amazon Web Services depend on billions of dollars in contract with the NSA, the CIA, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the Pentagon.) It was recently revealed that an investment firm tied to the government of the United Arab Emirates invested $500 million in Trump’s crypto company and pocketed a 49 percent stake in the firm. This is just one sleazy deal of many within Trump’s wonderful world of graft and grift. (To get a fuller picture of Trump’s supersize swamp, check out this graphic.) Out in the open, Trump has turned the presidency into a cash-generating business for him, his family, and his cronies, creating a mess of conflicts of interests that previously would never have been tolerated. They know we know. And back to the lies—just the recent ones. Acquiring Greenland is a “national emergency.” The economic numbers are “spectacular” and “inflation has stopped.” Vladimir Putin wants a peace deal. Housing costs “are way down.” ICE is mainly rounding up criminals. Trump has ended eight wars. The 2020 election was “rigged.” The January 6 rioters were “patriotic” Americans entrapped by the FBI. Renée Good was a domestic terrorist. Alex Pretti was an “assassin.” All bullshit. They know we know. In fact, the Trump mob, so used to skating by, figured it could say whatever it wanted about Good and Pretti to vilify them and justify their murders by out-of-control federal agents. Yet, finally, there was a burst of blowback, with popular opposition to the smearing of American citizens killed by Trump’s secret police force. The revulsion triggered by the efforts to demonize Pretti and Good showed that Trump’s factotums—Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, JD Vance—could not pull off over-the-top, Trump-style lying as well as the grandmaster, but it has not caused Trump and his crew to ratchet back on the prevaricating. And they’re sticking with the audacity of awfulness. The racism, abuses of power, corruption, and lies are not ebbing. Trump has learned the lesson that while one outrage may stand out and cause political trouble, a flood of outrages can be numbing. Excess has always been the key to Trump’s success, and that includes excessive wrongdoing, from the petty (placing his name on the Kennedy Center) to the grand (pocketing billions in shady deals). The question is whether his tsunami of transgressions will continue to spur shrugs among many Americans or come to trigger more widespread disgust. Trump and his band of racists, profiteers, scoundrels, and flunkies seem high on their shamelessness. They defiantly flaunt their brazenness. They revel in their exploitation of power and their embrace of violence, dishonesty, intimidation, and brutality. Look what we can get away with. This has always been a favorite fix for Trump: conning the suckers. In despotic and corrupt societies, rulers and their favored elites rely upon popular acquiescence and apathy—people becoming accustomed to all the lies and corruption. Trump and his stooges are counting on the same occurring in the United States so they can turn this nation into an authoritarian kleptocracy. They know that’s the plan. Do we? Join Indivisible! Support the opposition! Become a “local listener!” Enjoy Bad Bunny!