Trump, Tiny Little Hypocrisies, Untruths, And War Propaganda

By Robert Kimball Shinkoskey Photos: Wikimedia Commons Recently we have been reminded of tiny little hypocrisies of the Trump administration. With the firing of Pam Bondi, one news outlet took us back to an earlier testimony before Congress, where she said in no uncertain terms that in her tenure at the Justice Department, “The partisanship and the weaponization of justice will be gone.” However, from the moment she was confirmed to the moment of her dismissal, she undertook the most obvious and flagrant partisanship and weaponization of justice ever seen in America. She hung a huge banner of the President on the DOJ building and dutifully prosecuted the President’s enemies one after another. In other words, her public testimony before Congress was a calculated and bald-faced lie. Another administration hypocrisy was revealed recently. The President says that government fraud in Democrat states like California is “so large, that if successful [prosecution], we would literally be able to balance our budget.” Does anybody remember that the President himself was convicted of 34 counts of business fraud in New York state in 2024? Those were actually felony crimes which were later dropped because a sitting president supposedly can’t be held accountable for crimes committed before he took office or committed while he is in office, policies as ridiculous as they are unconstitutional. It has been said many times that “Truth is the first casualty in war.” That aphorism has once again come to the fore in the Trump war on Iran. On a number of occasions, the President assured the nation that Iran’s capacity to defend itself against air attacks had been totally destroyed by his efforts there. However, along comes news that a F-15 fighter jet and an A-10 Warthog were both shot own over Iran, and that a U.S. helicopter was chased out of the territory. Oh well, who remembers what happens in the past, and who cares anyway? The President’s pronouncements are like revelation from God Almighty. They must either never be questioned or else people must focus on his accomplishments rather than his shortcomings, so say his die-hard supporters.    The President was also caught in an unguarded moment revealing his bottom-line policy for the federal government. He told supporters that on the national level, “We have to take care of one thing, military protection of the United States.” That is why he is asking for a monstrous and unheard-of-before boost in his personal warmaking budget for fiscal year 2027 to $1.5 trillion after asking for an unheard-of-before $1.0 trillion in federal fiscal year 2026 [October 2026 through September 2027]. By comparison, the inflation-adjusted cost of WWII was about $800 billion a year during 1941-45. Does the President have World War III in mind? The American mind has plummeted far downward from the level of constitutional understanding common in the pre-World War II era. For example, before America’s entry into WW II a poll indicated that 80% of Americans were opposed to entering Hitler’s European war if no hostile act had been committed against the United States by Germany. Today, no hostile act against America was committed by Iran, but Trump went to war anyway without the American people’s blessing or the American Congress’ blessing. The question must be asked, how on earth will our President fund all this new warmaking? He recently made clear to a private meeting of supporters, “We can’t take care of day care, Medicaid, and Medicare” on the federal level. Those kinds of things have to be done on the state level, he said. Accordingly, he is asking to slash those programs and others in order to make room for his campaign to take over policing of the entire globe.  Speaking of hypocrisies, exaggerations, and proposed overnight destruction of the federal government’s health care and social service capacities, Trump has also heralded what he has been able to do with the paltry military funding he has had to make do with to date. He said during his speech to the nation on April Fool’s Day, “There would be no Israel or Middle East if I had not ended the Obama nuclear deal with Iran.” This is delirious political propaganda that is wrong on so many levels for thinking Americans, but right on so many levels for his unthinking base. Robert Kimball Shinkosky is an award winning citizen editorial writer for Utah, west coast, and national newspapers. As a long time state government worker and student of the American presidency, he speaks out boldly about the need for citizen participation, a renewed democracy, and constitutional limits on absolute power. Kimball’s most recent book is a scholarly interpretation of the scope of the Ten Commandments, showing how those laws applied to government as well as citizens in ancient Israel. They match provisions found in the U.S. Constitution. and can help forge a path out of the wilderness of today’s culture and authorita