This is all getting hard to keep up with

An activist friend recently wrote, โDoes anyone else see the irony? Right wingers defending Trumpโs having to have the name of the USS John McCain covered because heโs so triggered by it, as they tell black people and their allies to stop being snowflakes about Confederate flags and monuments?โ
No, I hadn’t seen the irony, and I simultaneously felt as though I should have seen it right away. But then, that’s the whole problem with this fractaled tapestry so rich in ironies called the Trump administration. There are just too many lies and ironies for us to keep up with. Donald Trump, the soon-to-be 73 year old man, positively runs me ragged with his endless stream of lies, hypocritical pronouncements and outrages. The lies alone are too much for us. We are being buried in Donald Trumpโs lies, and it is an ironic byproduct of those lies that, if we do not call them out them right away, Trump will co-opt us as supporters of those lies.
CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin put it to Anderson Cooper this way: โIt’s an interesting question of just what our journalistic obligation is. If he [Trump] tells 35 lies and you correct 18, you still have a lot of lies floating out there in the world.โ So forget about parsing the lies Trump tells us into hypocrisies, our work is cut out by simply cataloging and refuting what lies we can handle. It’s the embarrassment of riches of lies that have us overwhelmed. It may be up to history to track the hypocrisies and ironies.
In her commencement address to Harvard, Angela Merkel observed that much damage is done when lies are presented as truth and truths are presented as lies. There can be little doubt that Dr Merkel was thinking of Donald Trump when she said this.
During his seventeen minute press gaggle on Thursday morning, for instance, Trump referred to a โbusiness disputeโ he had with Robert Mueller. No, it wasn’t a boardroom battle of two titans hurling thunderbolts at each other in some megalithic takeover bid. In 2011, Mueller resigned his familyโs membership with Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, saying in the letter, โWe live in the District and are unable to make full use of the club,โ and he wanted to know if he’d be entitled to a partial refund of the membership fee.
Trumpโs organization sent Mueller a letter saying Mueller would be placed on a waitlist and be refunded on a โfirst resigned/first refunded basis.โ Even Steve Bannon told Trump some time ago to ignore that, because it did not constitute a conflict of interest, and to claim otherwise or make it seem like a huge business dispute would be โridiculous and pettyโ according to the Mueller report. But then, โridiculous and pettyโ is exactly what Donald Trump does several times a day, every day. It’s getting very hard to keep up with it all.
Accordingly, Palmer Report is expanding. We're bulking up our editorial and research staff and leaving no stone unturned on the editorial front and activism front. I'm asking you to help me build Palmer Report into what it needs to be. We're now 43% of the way to our funding goal. Please click here to donate whatever you can to this effort. Our future and our way of life depend on it.

Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.