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Wee Kek Koon
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Wee Kek Koon

Trump enablers buy a fool’s lies, just like Chinese ministers who swore a deer was a horse

Donald Trump’s lies are so ludicrous only idiots or lapdogs could believe them. In Qin dynasty China, aides parroted a counsellor’s lie too

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Is US President Donald Trump about to tell another whopper here? How surreal – and frightening – it must be to live in a country where those in power do not even pretend that truth matters, columnist Wee Kek Koon opines. Photo: EPA-EFE/Pool
Wee Kek Koon
Having lived his whole life in the modern cities of Singapore and Hong Kong, Wee Kek Koon has an inexplicable fascination with the past.

For those of us outside the United States, just reading about President Donald Trump’s careless disregard for facts is frustrating enough. I cannot imagine how surreal – and frightening – it must be for many who live in a country where the people in power do not even pretend that truth matters.

From alleging that trade talks with China had taken place last month, which Beijing denied, to taking credit for brokering the recent ceasefire between India and Pakistan, a claim that India has rejected, we do not know who or what to believe any more.
Whereas the US was once the “city upon a hill” that many countries looked up to, its global reputation is now in tatters, stained by the countless lies that the US president has fed Americans and the rest of the world. The Washington Post counted 30,573 falsehoods, and that was only during Trump’s first presidential term from 2017 to 2021.

How does Trump get away with it? How is it possible that tens of millions of the Maga faithful continue to buy into his bellicose and cruel vision for the country and believe in his lies, some of which are so hilariously ludicrous that they would not fool anyone with the barest modicum of intelligence?

Part of this absurd state of affairs has to do with Trump’s enablers. Unlike his first term, when at least some of his political appointees had expertise in their portfolios, Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants whose only quality is their personal loyalty to him.

Instead of calling out the blatant, at times bizarre, falsehoods spewed by their boss-patron, Trump’s obsequious acolytes and the entire Republican Party apparatus choose to toe the line, however ridiculous that line often is.

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