Why are the two least trusted politicians in America also the two major party nominees? Maybe there’s an advantage to divorcing what you say from what is actually true.
This isn’t crazy. If you are untethered by the truth, then you have a broader range of things you can say, which enhances your ability to say things flattering yourself or denigrating your rivals and critics.
For instance, Hillary Clinton gets away with saying things like the Supreme Court “took away a presidency” from Al Gore, or that she voluntarily turned over all the emails she had sketchily moved to a private server. She says these things, they serve her purpose, and if she’s unlikely, a fact-checker points out (to a much smaller audience) a few hours later that what she said was false.
Donald Trump today made a plausible-sounding, self-aiding, critic-disparaging, and totally false accusation about Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post and Amazon.com. Bezos, Trump said, is “using The Washington Post for power so that the politicians in Washington don’t tax Amazon like they should be taxed.”
First, I’ve followed this pretty closely, and I have seen zero evidence that the Post uses its platform to advance Amazon.com’s agenda.
More importantly, Trump has Amazon’s position on taxes wrong. Amazon—to its discredit, in my opinion—has for four years been lobbying in favor of a federal law to expedite sales-tax collection for online sales. Why? Because Amazon is already collecting such sales tax, thanks to court rulings that found Amazon’s network of warehouses constituted a “physical presence” in most states. Smaller online retailers don’t have such a physical presence, giving them a tax advantage over Amazon.
Read the ABC, Associated Press, and Fox News reports. They all carry Trump’s charge, and none point out that his premise—that Amazon is working to avoid online sales tax laws—is false.
So Trump gets a sharp attack on the Washington Post that burnishes his populist appeal—something that would be unavailable to him if he were constrained by the truth.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
