Throughout Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and during his two and a half years in office, gaslighting has become a favorite tactic of his whenever he’s back into a corner and held accountable for the things he says and does. When he sided with Russian President Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence agencies, saying he “didn’t see any reason why it would be” Russia who hacked into the DNC email servers, he later tried to convince everyone that what he meant was that he didn’t see any reason it wouldn’t be Russia. No one with any sense bought it then, nor any of the other times he tried insulting Americans’ intelligence.
On Tuesday, Trump tried a similar tactic in spinning his siding with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un while on foreign soil against a former vice president. He didn’t really insult the vice president or side with Kim Jong Un in insulting Biden. After all, Trump translated Korean and knew that the word Kim used meant “idiot” but he “softened” that and said “individual.”
No one should buy this. In fact, it’s laughable.
Trump’s endless schoolyard bully nicknames and insults are wearing thin, even among some of those feckless voters who supported him in 2016. His taunting is immature, beneath the dignity of the highest office in the land, and embarrassing. His gaslighting of Americans to cover up that social media trolling is even more so.
Twitter certainly wasn’t going for it. Read some of their comments below:
Featured image via Flickr by Gage Skidmore under a Creative Commons license
