Now they notice?
by digby
It's interesting that a number of Trump supporters have spoken out on the president lying about his payment to Stormy Daniels.
The recent collapse of Trump’s lies about his hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels has prompted conservative media outlets to hit the panic button.
Several right-wing outlets and personalities have taken a quick break from helping to prop up Trump’s unpopular presidency to criticize how he and his team have handled the story.
Newly hired Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani has created yet another slow-motion trainwreck for this administration, this time consisting of a series of television appearances and newspaper interviews in which Giuliani admitted Trump paid Michael Cohen to funnel money to Daniels in exchange for her pre-election silence.
Fox News host Neil Cavuto complained on-air in a commentary directed to Trump: “How can you drain the swamp if you’re the one who keeps muddying the waters?”
Citing Trump’s direct denials of the payments, in contrast to the evidence now known about the transaction, Cavuto said, “I’m having a devil of a time figuring out which news is fake.”
The criticism echoes some elements of press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ press briefing, where she effectively admitted that Trump had lied about the details of the story when it first broke.
Cavuto told Trump “your own words” give “lots of pause.” He concluded, “I guess you’re too busy draining the swamp to ever stop and smell the stink you’re creating. That’s your doing. That’s your stink. Mr. President, that’s your swamp.”
An editorial from the Wall Street Journal called out Trump’s “public deceptions” and noted “the attempted cover-up has done greater harm than any affair would have.”
The conservative newspaper highlighted the crisis of credibility that Trump has created as he repeatedly lied about the payoff, and now “wants everyone to believe a new story that he could have told the first time.”
In their conclusion, the Journal writes, “Mr. Trump is compiling a record that increases the likelihood that few will believe him during a genuine crisis,” and, “Mr. Trump should worry that Americans will stop believing anything he says.”
This is what it took for them to become alarmed? Lying about when he knew about the Stormy payment?
He recently passed the 3,000 lies as president mark:
According to the Washington Post, which has been diligently noting down every single falsehood along with The Fact Checker's database, Trump's 3,001 untrue claims have come at a quicker rate lately.
In the first 100 days, he told 4.9 lies, whereas in the last two months he's told an average of nine a day.
It isn't just the frequency of his lying that's a surprise either - it's the repetition of old lies. The Washington Post found Trump repeated 113 untrue claims at least three times apiece.
He's a pathological liar and they know it. But they seem to have decided that it's time to step in and say something about it. I wonder why?
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