You Go, Pete!

Pete Buttigieg on FOX (15 minutes).  America elected an extraordinary black president.  I’m not entirely sure — which is in itself astonishing — that it might not be ready to elect an extraordinary gay president.  How far we’ve come.

FAREED ZAKARIA

Trump appears to order the government to lie on behalf of tariffs.

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. . . For these new sweeping tariffs, the rationale — discovered suddenly in the last few months — is alleged forced labor. The administration has declared that countries ranging from Cambodia and China to Norway, Japan and Australia have failed to keep products made with forced labor out of their markets, and that this failure burdens American commerce. The charge is so obviously spurious and sweeping (Sweden is as bad as Cambodia?) that it gives away the game. It was almost certainly devised because the White House needed a legal pretext to subvert the spirit of the Supreme Court ruling against Trump.

This is more than ordinary political spin. The president appears to be ordering the United States government to formally certify as fact something it knows is not true. Agencies must publish findings, construct legal arguments and affix the authority of the American state to a falsehood manufactured for the apparent purpose of evading the nation’s highest court. That is how institutions are corrupted: First they are asked to bend the truth, then to attest to the lie. And then the lies become routine, so no one thinks they are unusual. It is the road to Orwell’s world.

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