We Are Being Gaslighted About the Gaslighter-in-Chief

One of the top political stories leading the news this morning is a piece in the New York Times headlined: "Trump Discussed Pulling U.S. From NATO, Aides Say Amid New Concerns over Russia."

Except...that is not breaking news.

As I noted on Twitter: "It's not news that Trump wants to leave NATO. He's been saying that since he started running. It was one of the key pieces of evidence that he was Putin's puppet. But people who have been connecting these dots for YEARS have been dismissed as hysterics as conspiracy theorists."

Here, for example, is me writing about Trump, his NATO position, and how it's a gift to Putin in May of 2017:

Trump is working very hard to undermine goodwill with our NATO allies, with a special insult to Germany. Since the end of WWII, Russia has had an explicit objective of busting up the U.S.-German alliance, because the combined strength of the U.S. and Germany, in both military might and democratic cultural influence, provided a check on the empiric aspirations of the Soviet Union, now Russia. Trump's subversion of the U.S-Germany relationship is providing a dangerous opening to Putin, who has already made abundantly clear his intent to rebuild Russia's reach with his annexation of Crimea and moves in Ukraine.

And a year later, during the NATO summit in Brussels, June of 2018:

Trump's strategy appears to be: Continue to tell lies about the structure of NATO to underwrite demands that NATO members will not possibly meet, because they are absurd, then use their refusal to justify the United States' withdrawal from NATO. I hope I'm wrong about that, and fear that I'm not.

In the meantime, however, he is without question doing the most to weaken the United States' alliance with Germany, which is a massive gift to Putin. With whom he will meet after the summit.

And two years earlier, in July of 2016, after Trump told the New York Times' Maggie Haberman that "he and Putin share a disdain for NATO" and "openly questioned whether the U.S., under his leadership, would keep its commitments to the alliance": "It's terribly concerning that there are so many U.S. voters who won't hear about this, won't understand it, won't care. We really are in uncharted waters, and they are incredibly stormy. Stormy enough to sink a ship of state."

That was before the election in which he became president (with Russia's help). That Trump has questioned the U.S.'s role in the NATO alliance is literally older than his presidency. It was one of the primary arguments against it!

Anyway. This is like the third "BREAKING!" story in the past few days that is not even breaking a little bit. This is fucking gaslighting on an epic scale.

What a gift to the gaslighter-in-chief.