Donald Trump is About to Learn What People REALLY Think of Him. I Couldn't Be More Excited!
In the early 1990s, Charles Barkley became very angry about something that had been written about him in a book. The surreal thing is that the book was not written by a hated rival or a journalist with a grudge.
No, the ostensible author of the book that enraged Barkley was the Round Mound of Rebound himself, and, to a lesser extent, ghostwriter Roy S. Johnson.
Nobody expects a legend like Barkley to write the books credited to them. Barkley, however, didn’t even read Outrageous, his controversial 1991 autobiography.
Barkley eventually read the first three chapters of his own autobiography and said it seemed true enough even as he claimed to have been “misquoted” on numerous occasions in what is, again, ostensibly a book that Barkley wrote about his own life.
I recently read about a different celebrity author who strongly disagrees with at least some of the thoughts, ideas and sentiments contained in a book that they themselves wrote.
I am referring to Mark Meadows, a longtime Trump ally who served as Trump’s final Chief of Staff and played a crucial role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and have Trump remain in the White House.
When Meadows published The Chief’s Chief in 2021 he reigned as one of Trump’s most loyal and devoted sycophants. He continued to play that role in The Chief’s Chief.
In The Chief’s Chief, for example, Meadows parroted Trump’s claim that he was robbed of a sacred landslide victory because Biden’s “allies in the liberal media” had helped him rig the election and steal the presidency.
I’m not sure how bright that future is going to be, Don.
In his book Meadows, with the help of his ghostwriter wrote, "The people who rigged this election knew that eventually, these irregularities would come to light ... [So] they conducted the operation, then attacked anyone who dared ask questions about what they had done.”
Here’s the fun thing: from a legal perspective you don’t actually need to tell the truth when you write a book unless your falsehoods veer into the realm of slander or defamation.
Meadows could go right on repeating the lies that he helped promote as one of Trump’s biggest flunkies on right-wing media, secure in the knowledge that no one would call him on his bullshit because pretty much everyone’s in the tank for Trump.
When you are under oath, however, you lose the freedom to lie egregiously and get away with it.
When Meadows was interviewed by special counsel Jack Smith, who offered him immunity if he testified under oath, however, he told a much different story. It wasn’t just a different story; it was an antithetical story.
A man who tried to get the election overturned and fed into Trump’s delusions as much as anyone other than Rudy Giuliani conceded that the election most assuredly was not stolen.
According to Yahoo News, “Meadows informed Smith's team that he repeatedly told Trump in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election that the allegations of significant voting fraud coming to them were baseless.”
He furthermore told Smith’s people that Trump was being less than honest when he said he won the election mere hours after polls closed, when votes were still being counted.
Not only did Meadows say that he did not see ANY evidence of fraud; he agreed that the 2020 presidential election was actually the most secure in history.
Meadows’ words and actions aren’t surprising. He was just one of many Republicans who publicly claimed to believe Trump’s furious assertions that the election was stolen from him in the greatest crime in human history publicly while privately asserting that they know damn well that Biden won the election fair and square.
Republican politicians who are grown ups and not cultists know damn well that Trump is lying about the 2020 election and has been doing so well before it even happened. They know that Trump is a thin-skinned bully zonked out of his mind on Adderall who has the maturity and attention span of a toddler. Yet they also know that Trump still somehow has a stranglehold on the hearts and minds of conservative voters so they are obligated to pretend that he’s right and that a terrible injustice was perpetrated when Biden was given the presidency just because he earned it.
The only way to get people like Meadows to tell the truth is to force them to do so under oath in order to save their own asses.
Trump seems to pride himself on behaving like a mobster. Now he’ll get to know what it feels like when your weaselly criminal associates flip on you to save themselves. He’ll get to learn what people like Meadows REALLY think of him in their hearts of hearts.
It’s going to hurt like hell. No one deserves that kind of pain more than Trump.
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