Mark Sanford was living a lie, in the chapter of his life when he imploded, so he has a unique vantage point on Trump and his lies.

I wasn't going to turn on the Sunday shows today, but I did. You can see in the previous post that I watched "State of the Union." I blogged the discussion of the Bob Corker observation that "It's becoming a cultish thing, isn't it? It's not a good place for any party to end up with a cult-like situation as it relates to a president that happens to be purportedly of the same party."

I also watched "Meet the Press," and I'd scribbled a note for what I wanted to blog from the transcript, and I'm surprised to see that this too is something that began with that Corker quote. The host, Chuck Todd, was talking to Congressman (and former Governor) Mark Sanford, who tried to get the GOP nomination for South Carolina Senatorut his congressional district in South Carolina but lost out to someone who, unlike him, supported Trump.

Todd asked Sanford if he'd use the word "cult" to describe what has happened to the GOP, and Sanford said:

I wouldn't go so far as cult, but I would just say that, from an electoral sense, people are running for cover because they don't want to be on the losing side of a presidential tweet.... And from a popular standpoint, it's almost a Faustian bargain. I'll pander to you if you pander to me.... And that exchange is very dangerous really, with regard to, again, what the Founding Fathers set up, which is a system designed to garner debate and dissent. 

Garner! I exclaimed the word out loud.

The idea that you can't speak out and say, "I disagree with you here but I agree with you on 90% of the stuff"... is, again, a twilight world that I've never seen.

Huh? You are about to enter another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight World!

Todd pushed Sanford to talk about the way "that literally the president can just say whatever he wants, fact free, mischaracterized." And Sanford said:

That's a larger commentary on society and where we are. But because we've gone from George Washington, "I can't tell a lie by cutting down the apple tree"...

Apple tree?!!

... to they've become so replete that nobody even questions him anymore. And that's, again, a dangerous spot to be in a reason-based republic. I have a unique vantage point on this front.

Yeah! He's famously a liar!

We all know the story of 2009 and my implosion.

Implosion.

A lie was told on my half -- behalf, which means I own it. 

We paused after he said "half" and laughed a lot. Then when we got to "behalf," we were puzzled. What? Did someone else lie for him and it's big of him to take responsibility?

More to the point, I was living a lie in that chapter of life.

Yeah, get to the point. You were a liar. Living a lie. Chapter of life. Implosion. A lie was told on my half. Ludicrous! We were laughing here at Meadhouse.

But there were incredible consequences..... Financially, politically, socially, I lost my -- I can go down a long list. A long list. And so maybe the reason I'm so outspoken on this now is there is no seeming consequence to the president and lies. 

He's envious! How does Trump get away with all his lies? (It's like the sexual harassment conundrum: Why did Al Franken need to resign, why did all those Democrats crash and burn, and Trump gets to be President?)

And if we accept that as a society, it is going to have incredibly harmful consequences in the way that we operate going forward, based on the construct of the Founding Fathers.

Consequences, consequences. If the liar doesn't get consequences, there will be consequences for all of us, going forward. Ask the Founding Fathers.

"Number one, the camera of history is rolling. And it is on videotape now. And we will be able to see exactly what history is showing here."

Said Congressman Gregory Meeks (D-NY) on Jake Tapper's "State of the Union" this morning (transcript here). It's all on videotape now. That amused me.

What was the topic? Oh, the panel was invited to talk about Senator Corker's statement "We are in a strange place. It's almost, it's becoming a cultish thing, isn't it? It's not a good place for any party to end up with a cult-like situation as it relates to a president." (We talked about that a few days ago on the blog, here.)

Jake Tapper was so into Corker's idea that he teased it before the commercial by saying, "Everyone, stick around. We're going to take a very quick break. Look into my eyes. What do you see? I'm the cult of personality."

I wonder what percentage of Tapper's audience just thought he was being pretty weird as opposed to realized he was saying some lines from this old song:



Lyrics printed and annotated here. The lines that follow the ones Tapper quoted are: "I know your anger, I know your dreams/I've been everything you wanna be ohhh/I'm the cult of personality/Like Mussolini and Kennedy/I'm the cult of personality." Kennedy! Also mentioned in the song are Stalin and Gandhi.

Anyway, Rick Santorum was also on the panel, and he said: "I would just say any president has a cult-like following within -- to say Barack Obama didn't have a cult-like following. He had absolutely a cult-like following --" Then he got cut off by Jennifer Granholm, who interrupted him and invaded his space like mad. (That lady is on fire. Earlier, talking about separating migrant parents and children, she said — with big passionate gestures — "You could drive nails through my hands. You could whip me on my back but do not take my children away.")

Meeks followed Santorum's effort to include Barack Obama in the idea that there's a "cultish thing" around a President:

MEEKS: Number one, the camera of history is rolling. And it is on videotape now. And we will be able to see exactly what history is showing here. Barack Obama when he was president, there were Democrats that did not agree with some of the things that he said. For example, TPP, they spoke out about it. They didn't reel it in. Even (INAUDIBLE) to immigration. There were members of Congress, Democrats who said -- and pushed it more on DACA, to create DACA.... But the Republicans here is yielding everything and the Republican Party no longer exists. It is the Trump party. We are losing our values. And when we took our oath of office it wasn't to a president. It was to a country. We are on a dangerous —

Obviously, there are Republicans who don't agree with some of the things Trump says. What's the real distinction here? Shouldn't a party reshape around a President if the President's any good? What compliment is it to Obama to say he didn't recreate the Democratic Party?

"It’s becoming a cultish thing, isn’t it? It’s not a good place for any party to end up with a cultlike situation as it relates to a president that happens to be of — purportedly — of the same party."

Said Senator Bob Corker, quoted in "Republicans embrace the ‘cult’ of Trump, ignoring warning signs," which is The Washington Post's response to this week's primaries, including the one in South Carolina, where a promising GOP newcomer, Katie Arrington, beat the well-known Mark Sanford in the Senate race the race for his congressional district.  WaPo identifies Sanford as "a firmly conservative member of Congress who had survived earlier scandal." It doesn't mention that he was the governor of South Carolina (when he became a national laughing stock, "walking the Appalachian Trail")( and that explains why my tag for him is "Gov. Sanford").

Why shouldn't WaPo celebrate Arrington's victory and exult at the rejection of the disgraced Mark Sanford? Why not use the template Women Triumph Over Sleazy Men? I know WaPo has that template, but I assume the answer is that everything must be understood through the loathing of Donald Trump.

Sanford criticized Trump, and Trump tweeted in support of Arrington. That seems to reflect the simple popularity of the man who got himself elected President, but somehow that's a "cult." By the way, was Obama a cult? I don't mind the use of the word "cult" to describe and explain personal political popularity, but WaPo is so aggressively slanted these days. It's propaganda. It's the cult of hating Trump.

Trump’s closest allies have largely dismissed the “cult” commentary, as Corker put it, as evidence of cultural and class tension inside the Beltway.

Oh!  As Corker put it. It's Corker's word, and when WaPo uses the word, it puts the word in quotation marks. Well, all right then. Journalism credibility protected — with scare quotes. And they go to the other side for balance. Look, it's Scaramucci again:

“They keep saying the cult stuff because they don’t like the disruption and change,” said former White House communications director and financier Anthony Scaramucci. “He doesn’t speak with an elitist vocabulary and the savoir faire that Washingtonians are used to,” referring to Trump.

The next line is a warning:

Disruption works both ways, however, and is no guarantee of success in midterm elections, which are often perilous to a president.

As if the Washington Post is inclined to give good advice to the GOP.

And then it's back to the Trump antagonists, this time to address the unstated question that WaPo must know readers have (and I said it myself, above, was Obama a cult?):

“I don’t think we, or any president, demanded personal loyalty to the degree Trump has,” said David Axelrod, an Obama adviser during his first campaign and term. “We made appeals around shared goals, ideals and agendas. We didn’t play in primaries. Popular as he was, Obama’s party was not the cult that the GOP is today.”

Here's the influential Trump tweet:

Mark Sanford has been very unhelpful to me in my campaign to MAGA. He is MIA and nothing but trouble. He is better off in Argentina. I fully endorse Katie Arrington for Congress in SC, a state I love. She is tough on crime and will continue our fight to lower taxes. VOTE Katie!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2018

Ha ha. Argentina. Click on my "Appalachian Trail" link above. Sanford, as governor, told people he was off to hike the Appalachian Trail — so wholesome! — but he went to Argentina — to commit adultery.

"The reason Flake and Corker dropped out of the Senate race is very simple, they had zero chance of being elected. Now act so hurt & wounded!"

Trump tweeted this morning. For more on the context: "Trump Keeps Focus on Retiring Senators, Who Had ‘Zero Chance of Being Elected’" (NYT).

Donald Trump is lashing, rupturing, imperiling, imploding, plunging, laboring, brooding and — to quote Senator Corker — "on the path to World War III."

As reported by Robert Costa, Philip Rucker, Ashley Parker in The Washington Post.

If we scroll halfway down the long page, we see that what's prompting the leakage to the press is not so much the threat to America and the world but the threat to the Republican Party:

"We have been watching the slow-motion breakup of the Republican Party, and Trump is doing what he can to speed it up," said Patrick Caddell, a veteran pollster who has worked with Stephen K. Bannon, Trump's former chief strategist, who now runs Breitbart News, a conservative website.

"Trump is firmly placing himself on the outside, trying to become an almost independent president," Caddell said. "He knows that many people will be with him, that he helps himself when he's not seen as the Republican president. But what about his program? That's the question — and possibly the cost of what he's doing."...

The president has groused to numerous White House aides about his concerns over his popularity with "my people" — his base. He blames the Republican establishment and others for failing to enact his agenda and making him look feckless...

Trump's political calculus is complicated by Bannon's return to his previous role at the helm of Breitbart. Now working to forward a nationalist agenda from outside the confines of the administration, Bannon has vowed war against any Republican lawmakers he believes are insufficiently conservative or who fail to help push through the agenda he and Trump outlined during the campaign....