Neil DeGrasse Tyson: Clinton is ‘crooked’ because Trump keeps repeating it

Donald Trump is proficient in what Tyson described in a recent tweet as “incessant repetition,” Tyson explained in an interview published Sunday with the Guardian.

“So you can make anything true that you want, as long as you repeat it all the time,” Tyson said while answering a question about the Paris climate deal. “So Trump keeps calling her ‘Crooked Hillary.’ That’s just part of her new name now — the first bit is Crooked, her second name is Hillary. You repeat this often enough and then you go interview Trump supporters and they say: ‘Well, she’s crooked.'”

“A new political truth has arisen simply by repetition,” he continued. “With politics, the only way you can undo what people think is true, but isn’t, is to vote them out of office.”

When asked what he thinks of the candidates, Tyson, who is the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, went on to say he will “never” complain about who is running, but he did say that there is an issue with how voters think.

“The issue is not who is running, or even what their thoughts are,” Tyson said. “The issue is that your fellow citizens are thinking one way versus another in the elections.

“So if you don’t like Trump, your gripe is not with Trump — he’s just a person,” Tyson went on. “Your gripe is with the 40 percent of the electorate that wants to vote for him. That’s who you should be talking to. If people think they are voting in their own interests — but are not — then they need to be trained how to think about claims made by politicians.”

Tyson expressed this same concern with the electorate, not the candidates themselves, back in June, when he cited Trump supporters while lamenting the state of the American education system.

“As an educator I care about the population and the electorate,” he said on Bill Maher’s HBO show “Real Time.”

“All this attention going to complain about Donald Trump,” Tyson said. “You’re not really complaining about Donald Trump. You’re complaining that there is a major portion of the electorate who likes him, and so they are your obvious object of your ire. If they are the object of your ire, then shouldn’t you be looking at the educational system that somehow allows people to not think about data, to not think about what is or is not true in this world?”

“You can knock Trump out of the contest and the population that supports him will just wait for the next one to rise up and you have to beat the next one over the head,” Tyson said.

In March, Tyson tweeted, “People who are anti-Trump are actually anti-Trump supporters — they oppose free citizens voting for the @realDonaldTrump.”