Who Can Believe This Government Anymore?

The rush to lying after the execution of ICU nurse Alex Pretti a week ago made it clear that lying and cover-up have become the norm of the current administration. Just as happened after the murder of Renee Nicole Good two-and-a-half weeks earlier, top officials concocted false narratives of the Pretti killing as if that could turn all the video shot by bystanders into deep fakes.

Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who sets the arrest quotas for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), went straight to social media to call Mr. Pretti a “domestic terrorist who had tried to assassinate federal law enforcement”.

On Thursday came the startling discovery of videos of Alex Pretti in a confrontation with federal agents 11 days before he was killed. He had allegedly kicked out the tail light of one of their vehicles and had been wrestled to the ground then, too. That he is revealed as someone more than a peaceful protester hardly justifies his killing, as hosts at Fox News are bound gleefully to contend.

Miller knew nothing of this, and knew nothing about Pretti when he tweeted three hours after the killing. His accusation was a total lie.

Nor did Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have any knowledge of the incident when she lied that Pretti had brandished a gun and appeared intent on inflicting “maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement”. No gun was brandished. Pretti had gone to the aid of a woman that a CBP agent had pushed to the ground, as seen in videos — an offense that brought seven officers to attack Pretti. In a video we hear an agent discovering Mr. Pretti was carrying a gun and see him removing it from the victim’s waistband only when Pretti was subdued flat on the ground. But Noem saw fit to hastily invent a lie to cover up yet another killing,

That was much the same as her claim after Renee Good was murdered that she had “weaponized” her vehicle and that ICE agent Jonathan Ross “defended his life”, refuted by video showing Ross out of the path of the car turning away from him, and that two of his three shots were point-blank from him standing alongside Good’s SUV. Yet Noem magnified the lie, saying “If you look at what the definition of domestic terrorism is, it completely fits the situation on the ground”.

Taking no responsibility for homicidal thugs on the forces let loose in an American city, Miller, Noem, and Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino hurried to get in front of the truth, reflexively lying to 340 million Americans to make the victims deserving of their deaths.

Donald Trump is of course the progenitor of lying as the government policy now emulated by all. In his first term The Washington Post memorably recorded over 30,000 false or misleading claims uttered by him. That database is still available .

The biggest of them is The Big Lie – his inexplicable (except by insanity) mania to construct an imaginary history that he won the 2020 election. All through the 2024 presidential campaign he had turned truth on its head calling those who stormed the Capitol “patriots” and “hostages” for being in prison. His fraud beyond comparison was to act on his lie by commuting sentences and pardoning over 1,500 charged for criminal acts that day accorded due process and and convicted in court proceedings, nullifying the largest investigation in the Justice Department’s history.

Driven as he is by an illness so severe that he cannot tolerate losing anything, Trump now has FBI Director Kash Patel ordering his agents – those not already diverted from pursuing criminals to instead tracking down migrants – to find any and all in the Bureau who were involved in investigations against Trump. Especially emphasized is Arctic Frost, an FBI operation overseen by Special Counsel Jack Smith that probed the plotting by Mr. Trump and others to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Thus is Trump ordering Patel to spend taxpayer money to deploy government resources to work on his personal obsession.

Looking for any way to make The Big Lie true, just this week Trump had Patel’s FBI raid an election office in Atlanta’s Fulton County. Years later he is still looking for ways to flip Georgia’s vote. Georgia is where Trump had in a phone call begged Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to come up with fraudulent votes to overcome his narrow loss:

"So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break."

The FBI’s search warrant says they are looking for physical ballots, their envelopes, provisional ballots, ballot images, and voter rolls determined to build a false case. Trump wants a recount, notwithstanding Georgia conducted three recounts at the time — by machine, by hand, and by signature verification — all confirming Biden as the winner with remarkably matching results. Insanity on full display.

Inducing acute embarrassment for any American watching, Trump carried on about the 2020 election before the potentates assembled at the annual gathering at Davos, Switzerland.

”Think of it. When I won in a landslide, a giant landslide won, all seven swing states, won the popular vote, won everything…”

Lying in front of them all. No landslide. 1.5% more than Harris. But why would this international audience care? He didn’t stop. About Ukraine:

”It’s a war that should have never started, and it wouldn’t have started if the 2020 U.S. presidential election weren’t rigged. It was a rigged election. Everybody now knows that. They found out. People will soon be prosecuted for what they did.”

This is his mental state, self convinced that “everybody now knows that”.

But mortifying for us to see was the account of a phone call with President of France Emmanuel Macron in which Trump insisted that the French president double drug prices so that U.S. pharmaceutical companies could reduce prices in the U.S.

”And I said, Emmanuel, you’re going to have to lift the price of that pill to $20, maybe $30. Think of that. That means it’s a doubling.”

And Macron replied, ‘No, no, no, Donald, I will not do that.’

”I said, ‘yes, you will a hundred per cent.’ He said ‘no, no, no, you’re asking me to double.’ I said, ‘Emmanuel, you’ve been taking advantage of the United States for thirty years with prescription drugs…I am a hundred per cent sure you’re going to.’

This went on back and forth for several minutes with Trump threatening to raise tariffs on French champagne and wines 100% until Macron finally relented, saying "‘No, no, Donald, I will do it. I will do it.’”.

Why mortifying? The indiscretion of revealing to a Davos audience typically composed of corporate CEO’s, diplomats, government officials the world this private conversation? No, no, no, that’s not it. It’s because the whole thing was fake. There never was such a phone call. There never was a Macron reduced to a whimper. Our buffoon was perpetrating a whopper of a lie defaming the president of France who, incidentally, does not control drug prices. And he this week repeated this hallucination in Thursday’s cabinet meeting. The Élysée Palace had to post a gif, a photo of Trump with “Fake News” plastered across his image.

Former Trump attorney Ty Cobb’s verdict? "I don't think there's anybody outside of the United States who believes that Trump is sane."

Lying has permeated every corner of this government. As we explored a couple of weeks ago, on its fifth anniversary Trump released on the White House website a complete inversion of the January 6, 2021, insurrection. We called it “propaganda lies enforced as the new truth of our nation.” It is a compendium of lies. It has as prime example that it was the Capitol police guilty of attacking “peaceful protesters”, “deliberately escalating tensions” by aggressively firing “tear gas, flash bangs, and rubber munitions” into the crowds. Odd that those same methods by ICE and CBP were protocol in Minneapolis.

In the inverted world where truth is unwelcome there is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth calling his domain The Department of War, which doesn’t exist, and “investigating” members of Congress for telling the truth. With our military blowing boats out of the Caribbean and Pacific upon no proof that their occupants were ferrying drugs, and no justification for their murder even if they were, the group had the temerity to post a video reminding our soldiers, sailors, and airmen that…

“Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders.”

They are reciting law, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, cited to all when they join the services. But Hegseth, all about aggressive lethality, wants that truth silenced.

Mr. Trump says the economy is great, but we all know prices are up. At Davos he says…

”grocery prices, energy prices, airfares, mortgage rates, rent and car payments are all coming down and they’re coming down fast. We inherited a mess, but we’ve done a hell of a job in 12 months.”

…all of it a lie. All prices other than gasoline have been rising; there was no mess, with the inflation rate already reduced the day he took office to the same rate as today. Again, a bewildered international audience wondering what has this to do with them?

And he took his drug price math abroad. Less a lie than revealing that our president didn’t even pass 5th grade arithmetic, Mr. Trump told them:

”Under my most favored nation policy for drug prices, the cost of prescription drugs is coming down by up to ninety per cent, depending on the way you calculate. You could also say five, six, seven, eight-hundred per cent.”

That he has gone on speaking this error several times tells us something more, that none of his aides in the White House, nor any of the sycophants in his cabinet, have dared to correct him that nothing can be reduced more than 100%.

In the week before the Pretti killing, Homeland Security issued a statement headed:

”ICE Continues to Remove the Worst of the Worst from Minneapolis Streets as DHS Law Enforcement Marks 3,000 Arrests During Operation Metro Surge“

As we see, Kristi Noem has her department persist in the lie that ICE targets only the “worst of the worst”. She says…

”We have arrested over 10,000 criminal illegal aliens who were killing Americans, hurting children and reigning terror in Minneapolis because Tim Walz and Jacob Frey refuse to protect their own people and instead protect criminals”

…referring to the state’s governor and the city’s mayor. She claims in the last six weeks, DHS law enforcement arrested 3,000 “criminal” illegal aliens.

That leaves us wondering why there are so many criminals at large. The 3,000 in six seven-day weeks means an average of 71 a day. How could that many actual criminals be known of, located, and apprehended at this rate, and yet her claims go unchallenged. How is this not a lie when one thinks of the impossible coordination of 71 arrest teams and their protections teams organized and sent all over the city each single day?

Tom Homan has been brought in to replace Greg Bovino as commander of the immigration purge. Homan’s silent lie is his refusal to either admit taking a $50,000 bribe in an FBI sting or tell what became of this taxpayer money.

Trump says he has nothing to hide but he’s still ordering Attorney General Pam Bondi to stall infinitely the release of the Epstein files.

On and on it goes. It has become more reliable to think that truth lies in the opposite of whatever this government says. We’ll borrow from another writer who came upon a suitable epithet in Psalm 10 that says it’s a government “full of curses and deceit and fraud”.