As we here at AP have said many times, there are so many things going on in TrumpWorld that it’s really hard to decide which ones to report on first.
So let’s just send kudos to the Times’ Michael Tomasky, who wrote “Why Does Trump Lie?” (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/opinion/trump-lies.html?referringSource=articleShare).
Tomasky’s subtitle is “He has nothing but contempt for the institutions that exist to keep presidents in check.”
That pretty much sums it up, and it explains why Trump greatly admires dictators such as Kim Jongun, Xi Jingpin, and Vladimir Putin, who preside over countries where press freedoms are very severely limited.
And we are all well aware that he hates CNN, and this is no more apparent than when he demanded that CNN retract a poll that shows him way behind Joe Biden.
CNN’s executive vice president and general counsel wrote to the Trump campaign, saying, “To my knowledge, this is the first time in its 40-year history that CNN has been threatened with legal action because an American politician or campaign did not like CNN’s polling results. To the extent we have received legal threats from political leaders in the past, they have typically come from countries like Venezuela or other regimes where there is little or no respect for free and independent media.” See https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/10/politics/cnn-letter-to-trump-over-poll/index.html.
So we reached out to associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones, who is with Trump 24/7.
Jones immediately texted us back, saying, “SR, what do you expect from a man who’s been lying and cheating his whole life?”