If you continue to wonder how Trump's voters can be so deluded, this is why

If you continue to wonder how Trump's voters can be so deluded, this is why

by digby






Watch @seanhannity on @FoxNews NOW. Enjoy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 1, 2018



The Hannity rant Trump asked people to watch is just the same old tired material: Mueller, a longtime Republican, is a secret Dem out to get Trump; obstruction of justice is just a "process crime"; there's "no evidence of collusion" (please ignore all evidence of collusion). pic.twitter.com/j6bCei07ye

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 1, 2018






BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): What does [Michael Cohen's plea] mean, legally?

JEANINE PIRRO (FOX HOST): Nothing.

KILMEADE: Nothing? Nothing at all?

PIRRO: It means absolutely nothing. Look --

AINSLEY EARHARDT (CO-HOST): So why did he do it?

PIRRO: So why did he do it? Because they forced -- this is what happens. People don't remember everything. People say things that they can't exactly remember. And then the prosecutors come in and they say you willfully lied. You said this before. And then you say, gee, you know, maybe I forgot. I'm not sure. Well you have to come up with a reason. Why did you lie? I was trying to align with his messaging. Here is the bottom line, Donald Trump is the one who provided this information voluntarily to Mueller regarding the Russia attempt at the tower development in Moscow. Donald Trump was not involved in the negotiation. His team goes in as they always do, whenever they go into a country to try to develop, you know, a building or a hotel or whatever it is that they're building. Now it didn't work out. He didn't do it.

Let me ask you this. If the Russians were really intending to own Donald Trump so that they could get access to whatever they want in the United States, they would have made such a sweetheart deal for Donald Trump, that Donald Trump wouldn't have had a point or a choice other than to make sure that that deal went through. It didn't go through. They ended it, kaput. It's over. Now, Michael Cohen is a liar. He's an admitted liar in federal court, campaign finance and campaign debt, all that nonsense. What's amazing is nobody is talking about taxing medallions, which is the real issue where they could have sunk him big time. But they didn't. So what do they do? They bring this out to make it look like, oh there is Russia collusion. There was no Russia collusion in the dossier. There is no Russia collusion in the Donald Trump Jr. meeting at the tower. And there is no Russia collusion here. You show me how the fact that Michael Cohen said it ended, honestly it ended in June of 2017.

KILMEADE: Not January.

PIRRO: Not January 2016 I was off by six months. It doesn't matter when it ended okay, because nothing came of it. And, no, it doesn't influence anything. It doesn't show that the election was affected, that votes were affected, that emails were affected.



This guy appears regularly on CNN and acts as though he is an honest analyst. He worked for Ken Starr. Here's how he sounds on Fox:

SOL WEISENBERG (FORMER DEPUTY INDEPENDENT COUNSEL): If you actually look, Laura, at the plea agreement and at the criminal information, there is absolutely nothing that implicates President Trump in a crime. There's absolutely nothing in there that says where Michael Cohen says President Trump talked with me about the lie I was going to tell to Congress. We conspired, we talked about it. There is nothing whatsoever. So if we really confine ourselves to the actual law and not a bunch of babble that you hear all day on television, let's just look at the actual documents. It doesn't implicate President Trump in any way which brings up the question of why he was so angry if he had been told about this and why he came out and said Cohen is nothing but a liar. He's lying. All Cohen said is that I lied to Congress. He didn't say President Trump helped me lie. So, there could be all kinds of things that Mueller is keeping quiet from us that we don't know about, that Cohen has told him. That's possible. But that's the realm of speculation. Let's talk about reality, and reality is this is a nothingburger.

Aaaaand Trump's most important adviser:



CALLER: I haven't heard an idea that I have, and I don't know if it's feasible or not. With the corruption in the Department of Justice, the people that are demanded to appear, they don't appear, they appear, they lie, everything that's going on with all the corruption -- what about -- does President Trump have the authority to do -- have the JAG in the military do a tribunal, and investigate the Department of Justice that way? Where Congress --

SEAN HANNITY (HOST): He actually does have that authority.

CALLER: -- apparently cannot do its job.

HANNITY: Well, it's the -- again, that would be within the realm of the executive branch of the government, which he is the head of. Yeah, he would. And look, I think the president has been -- look, he could have fired Mueller, he could -- and he could do it legally, Alan Dershowitz said it yesterday. He could fire Rosenstein, he could have done that at any point, he didn't.




Media Matters collected most of these and notes:

After President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to “lying to Congress about the timing and extent of his negotiations,” on behalf of the Trump Organization, to build a Trump Tower in Moscow -- his second guilty plea to a federal crime in three months -- Trump’s sycophants and defenders in the media are proclaiming that Cohen’s guilty plea means “absolutely nothing.” By furiously attempting to spin the potentially devastating news as “a nothingburger,” right-wing media are simply picking up where they left off in August after Cohen pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance laws on Trump’s behalf. And even though Trump’s stooges in the media have openly worried about what may come next for some time now as the special counsel investigation continues, they continue to wage their public relations campaign with laughable spin.

Trump voters are brainwashed by non-stop right wing propaganda. Granted, they choose to watch it and they are obviously using it confirm their biases. They could watch something else if they chose.

But this is a big problem and I don't have the slightest idea how to fix it.

.