Follow this authorDana Milbank's opinions
FollowHey, it ain’t bragging if it’s true.
To borrow a Lincoln phrase (Trump has the “best words,” but Lincoln’s were pretty good, too), it is altogether fitting and proper for Trump to compare himself with a Civil War-era leader. This is because, thanks largely to Trump, the rights of American women have just been returned to where they were 160 years ago.
Trump accurately boasts that “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade” and “I was proudly the person responsible.” As a result of his achievement, conservatives on Arizona’s Supreme Court, freed by Roe’s demise, resurrected on Tuesday an 1864 law that bans nearly all abortions, even in cases of rape and incest, from the moment of conception. Trump invited just such Wild West jurisprudence the day before, when he said abortion policy should be left “up to the states.” Now, Arizona has restored women’s health care to an era when bloodletting and mercury pills were the standard of care, and patients had limbs sawed off without anesthesia.
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Maybe Trump should stick with the Mandela comparison. After all, the similarities are uncanny!
Mandela led the African National Congress. Trump led white nationalists to attack Congress.
Mandela did 18 years of hard labor on Robben Island. Trump made the hard decisions for 14 seasons on “The Apprentice.”
Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize with F.W. DeKlerk for abolishing apartheid. Trump won both the Club Championship trophy and Senior Club Championship trophy at Trump International Golf Club.
Mandela built the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to heal South Africa. Trump built Truth Social after he got kicked off of Twitter.
But dare we hope that Trump, on his Long Walk to Megalomania, might pause to think about what Mandela actually represented?
While Trump, like Stalin, calls the press “the enemy of the people,” Mandela argued that “a critical, independent and investigative press is the lifeblood of any democracy.”
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While Trump fans racial resentment and cultural paranoia, Mandela taught us: “It is not our diversity which divides us; it is not our ethnicity, or religion or culture that divides us. Since we have achieved our freedom, there can only be one division amongst us: between those who cherish democracy and those who do not.”
In that struggle of our time between democracy and its opponents, Trump is heir not to Mandela but to his jailers.
Just hours after wrapping himself in the mantle of Mandela, Trump revisited the 2018 speech in which he asserted that African nations (along with Haiti and El Salvador) were “s---hole countries.” At a fundraiser at a hedge-fund billionaire’s home in Palm Beach, Fla., where Trump raised a reported $50 million for his campaign, the GOP and his legal defense, Trump said that others took his remarks as “a very terrible comment, but I felt it was fine.”
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The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman and Michael Gold reported that, at the closed-door event (during which he promised the high-rollers more tax cuts), Trump complained about immigrants “coming in from just unbelievable places and countries, countries that are a disaster.” He reiterated his desire to welcome immigrants from Denmark, Switzerland and Norway rather than from places such as Yemen, “where they’re blowing each other up all over the place.”
In his interview the next day with Real America’s Voice, the modern-day Mandela again raised fears of dangerous, dark-skinned invaders. Without evidence, he informed his host that “they came in last night: numerous people from the Congo in Africa. They came in from the Congo. They were in jail in the Congo and now they’re living a beautiful life in the United States.”
The truly historic nature of Trump’s many assertions of his own greatness is that he can portray himself as Mandela, or Jesus, or Lincoln or Alexei Navalny (which he has also done), and a significant proportion of his followers will believe it. A Post-Schar School poll shows just how deep this pathology runs.
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As The Post’s Fact Checker, Glenn Kessler, and pollsters Scott Clement and Emily Guskin report, Trump’s supporters have become substantially more persuaded by disinformation than they were six years ago. They are more likely to say today that the 2016 election was marred by millions of fraudulent votes and that Russia did not interfere in that election — both demonstrably untrue. A majority of strong Trump supporters today believe his provably false assertions that Joe Biden won the 2020 election because of fraud, that the United States funds most of NATO’s budget and that global temperatures are rising because of natural, not human, causes. While only 28 percent of Americans believe Trump’s false claims on average, those who list Fox News as a primary news source are 13 percentage points more likely to accept the disinformation as true.
And Fox News is a paragon of journalistic integrity compared with the darker corners of the MAGA media landscape. Listening to Trump’s 10-minute interview with Real America’s Voice, I realized the host, Wayne Root — who was having his fifteenth interview with Trump — sounded even more bonkers than his subject, which is saying something.
Shouting into the camera, Root told Trump that his noncommittal statement on abortion policy (leave it to the states) took the issue “off the table! You’re brilliant! This is the perfect answer!” He went on to say that Americans have “been lied to about inflation, jobs reports, crime, the open border.” Democrats who support Biden “hate the Jews” and “hate the police and they support the criminals.” Jews should like Trump because “he makes us prosperous.” Inflation, as high as 9 percent in 2022, has eased substantially, to 3.5 percent in the latest report. But Root proclaimed that inflation “did not go down! They’re lying about it! … And they announced 303,000 new jobs. It’s a lie!” The host went on to recommend that Trump should announce on his first day that he will “deport 30 million illegals.”
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If this is your news source, is it any wonder that you have no idea what’s going on? Trump, doing his best to keep up with the crazy, decreed that “any Jewish person that votes for Biden does not love Israel, and, frankly, uh, should be spoken to.”........