Philip Bump: We're watching Trump's distortion of reality on Ukraine in real time
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/14/were-watching-trumps-distortion-reality-ukraine-real-time/
By Philip Bump
Oct. 14, 2019 at 10:41 a.m. EDT
The timeline isnt complicated. Responding to news reports about President Trumps interactions with Ukraines president, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced that her party was initiating an impeachment inquiry in the House. The following day, Sept. 25, the White House released a rough transcript of Trumps call with President Volodymyr Zelensky, which demonstrated that Trump had, in fact, asked Zelensky to investigate former vice president Joe Biden. The next day, the White House released the complaint written by an intelligence community whistleblower that contextualized Trumps requests in the broader context of how the president and his attorney Rudolph Giuliani were trying to get Ukraine to act against Biden.
Its proven to be difficult for Trump to argue that his actions were appropriate. Instead, he and his allies have tried to argue around the edges, criticizing how the whistleblower filed his complaint or how the Democrats are conducting the impeachment probe instead of defending Trumps actions on the merit.
In recent days, Trump has gone further, misrepresenting how Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) came to criticize Trumps call with Zelensky. Its a remarkable glimpse at how Trump tries to shift reality in front of our eyes, but also a good example of how hard it can be to suss out the line between a mistake and a lie.
On Sept. 26, the day after the rough transcript was released, Schiff offered a paraphrase of its contents during a hearing of the House Intelligence Committee, of which he serves as chair. The paraphrasing cast Trumps call in a deliberately negative light, with CNNs fact-checker Daniel Dale writing that Schiff did make it easy for viewers to get confused about what Trump had actually said.
In short order, Trump seized on Schiffs depiction of the call as problematic to the point of criminality. This is standard operating procedure for a guy who spent decades in New York real estate, inflating everything to its extreme. But over time, as Dale noted on Sunday, it also led Trump to reorder history to try to make Schiff look even more dishonest than Trumps misrepresentations.
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