On Wednesday morning Donald Trump’s Director of Alternative Facts, Kellyanne Conway, strolled out onto the White House lawn to chat with “the enemies of the people” (aka the free press). She quickly launched into a preemptive attack on the book that’s about to be released by former Trump National Security Advisor, John Bolton.

Without having read a single word, Conway insinuated that there are factual errors that she wants the media to research and correct. She couldn’t cite any examples of such errors, but she was adamant that they must be there because, in the view of the Trump cultists, anything critical of Trump has to be a deliberate lie by partisan haters. Never mind Bolton’s decades-long record as a committed ultra-conservative who Trump trusted enough to place in an influential White House post. Conway still lashed out with baseless inferences of errors that remained mysteriously vague:

“I think if you’re wrong about small things, you’re wrong about big things. And I do worry that there’s very little fact-checking.”

Coming from the person who coined the term “alternative facts,” this is a remarkable complaint. Conway is as pathological about lying as her boss. And her boss has been documented as having told more than 18,000 lies – big and small – since his inauguration. What’s more, Conway and Trump are usually complaining about too much fact-checking. They are notoriously averse to truth seekers, whom they malign as biased and controlled by his Democratic foes. And they dismiss non-partisan sources like PolitiFact where Trump’s record is dominated by a whopping 69% total finding of either “Mostly False,” “False,” or “Pants on Fire”.

Trump is so scared of the truth with regard to the Bolton book, that he has ordered his Attorney General, Bill Barr, to file a lawsuit aimed at blocking its publication. This is likely to be laughed out of court as an unconstitutional attempt to impede the First Amendments rights of the author.

The argument being made by the Trump administration is that some portion of the book contains material that is classified. But that’s a charge that has already been refuted by the National Security Council official responsible for classification and publication clearances, Ellen Knight. She worked with Bolton for months and “was of the judgment that the manuscript draft did not contain classified information.” However, she was later overruled by Trump loyalists with partisan axes to grind. According To Trump, though (video below)…

“I will consider every conversation with me as president highly classified. So that would mean if he wrote a book, and the book gets out, that would mean he’s broken the law. And I would think that he’d have criminal problems. I hope so.”

That, of course, is utter madness, with a pinch of toxic vengeance for spice. There is no precedent for asserting that every conversation with any president is automatically classified. Trump is making this up as he goes along. Additionally, he suggested that “maybe [Bolton] is not telling the truth. He’s been known not to tell the truth – A lot!” Which might explain why Trump hired him in the first place. But more to the point, if Bolton is lying, then there can’t be any allegation of disclosing classified material at all. How could it be classified if it isn’t true? Which brings us full circle back to the issue of truthfulness and how distant this president and his team are from it. They actually seem to revel in it.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
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President Trump on John Bolton: "Even conversations with me they're highly classified. I told that to the Attorney General before. I will consider every conversation with me as president highly classified…Any conversation with me is classified." pic.twitter.com/LbUIKl9dvd

— CSPAN (@cspan) June 15, 2020