“Truths are true no matter how many people deny them. Lies are lies no matter how many people believe them.” This quote I recently saw on a friend’s Facebook post jumped to my mind as I listened to Donald Trump’s address his adoring crowds in Cedar Rapids, Iowa last evening. It made me physically ill to see the young people, behind him on the platform and in the crowd, cheering and waving signs as he told lie after lie. Specifically:
That he was drafting “new” legislation which would bar new immigrants from receiving welfare for at least five years — a bill President Clinton signed into law in 1996. That it was “his idea” to put solar panels on his proposed hideous border wall on our southern border. That the official Russian investigations by Congress and the FBI are nothing but “witch hunts.”
That his Administration has made historic governing accomplishments like “few Presidents ever before.” That he decries the $6 trillion spent and lives lost in the Middle East over the last fifteen years — even as he has recently decided to reauthorize and even increase troop presence in Afghanistan. That the Paris climate agreement — from which Trump removed the United States — was actually “binding” had we stayed in…when clearly it was not.
One of the most heartless and hypocritical statements came when he praised the wealth of his top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, a former executive at Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street firm Trump so loudly criticized during his 2016 campaign. “In those particular positions, I just don’t want a poor person — does that make sense?” our President sneered. I wonder how justice might be advanced if there were a few “poor persons” (or persons who even know what poverty feels like) in the Cabinet.
How can Iowans continue to cheer for this buffoon when he ridicules the wind energy now produced in our state by thousands of turbines and criticizes trade deals in that same state whose economy relies heavily on exports? How can they continue to swallow his lies — including that the United States is one of the world’s highest-taxed nations (we are not!)? And how can they continue to swoon at his untrue statement about the size of the crowd even though “We’re not even campaigning…” — even though the event was sponsored wholly by his campaign committee?
How — I still do not understand — can people continue to vote against their own self-interests time and time again? So much so that Trump could tout the recent Republican victories in House races in Georgia and South Carolina, even claiming to be “five out of five” in such recent contests.
I do not understand what it happening in our country.
But I do know this:
Truths are still true no matter how many people deny them. Lies are still lies no matter how many people believe them.
That We All May Be One 
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