President George W. Bush once said that to get a message across, you had to repeat it over and over, “to kind of catapult the propaganda.” President Trump must have been paying attention.
I predict this will be a summer of nonstop, shameless propaganda from Trump and his minions. It will be clumsy, ridiculous and pathetic — but don’t ignore it. Call it out. Laugh at it. Recognize it for what it is: a sign not of strength but of fear.
Last week, in the White House, we saw a spectacle that would have embarrassed even Trump’s cult-of-personality role model, Kim Jong Un. Trump was announcing $16 billion in effective welfare payments to farmers whose livelihoods are threatened by his ill-advised trade war with China. As usual, the president went off-script. The assembled farmers must’ve been puzzled as he went into a diatribe about media reports saying he had been irate the day before, when he had stalked out of a meeting with congressional leaders that was supposed to be about infrastructure.
