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News / Opinion / Columns

Trump’s critic strategy: ‘I know you are but what am I?’

By Dana Milbank

Published: June 17, 2017, 6:01am

So Donald Trump is calling James Comey a liar.

This puts the fired FBI director in some impressive company. Among those Trump has accused of lying, via pronouncements, tweets and retweets:

Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, John Kasich, Jeb Bush, George W. Bush,the Bush dynasty, fellow GOP presidential candidates, all candidates, John McCain, Barack Obama, the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton, Tim Kaine, Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, Democrats, the Senate, George Will, GOP strategist Rick Tyler, The Club for Growth, reporters, journalists, fake-news media, CNN, The New York Times, The New York Post, The New York Daily News, Chris Cuomo, Megyn Kelly, Dana Perino, John King, women who accused him of sexual misconduct, China, doctors, baseball’s Alex Rodriguez, Star Jones, an Ebola patient, anyone who didn’t tune in to GOP debates to watch Trump.

Accusing others of lying is a bit rich coming from the man who has done more than any other to turn public discourse into a parallel universe of alternative facts. If we were psychoanalyzing Trump, we might say he is projecting. Of course, if we were psychoanalyzing Trump, we might throw the entire DSM at him, starting with antisocial personality disorder and working our way through narcissistic personality disorder and paranoid personality disorder.

But Trump’s tendency to accuse others of the flaws he possesses seems to be more than a reflex. It appears to be a strategy — a verbal jujitsu in which he uses his opponents’ strengths against them.

Trump was the old guy in the Republican debates and more than once seemed to fade partway through — but he managed to brand Jeb Bush “low energy.” He did the same to Clinton, portraying her as weak and tired; now he’s keeping an exceedingly light schedule as president and passing a good chunk of the time at his private retreats.

Trump told the most extravagant untruths during the campaign, had the most glaring conflicts of interest and knew the least about governing. But he branded Cruz as “Lyin’ Ted,” Clinton as “Crooked Hillary” and Rubio as a “lightweight” and “Little Marco.”

Trump did not invent this strategy. I first encountered it on the playground of the Old Mill Road elementary school on Long Island in the 1970s: “I’m rubber, you’re glue — whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.” Or its endlessly entertaining variant: “I know you are but what am I?”

Who is believable?

During the campaign, when the topic turned to Trump’s leadership of the “birther” movement questioning Obama’s U.S. birth, Trump declared that “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy.”

When Clinton pointed to the racist “alt-right” movement, Trump responded with, “Hillary Clinton is a bigot who sees people of color only as votes.” When Clinton alleged that Trump was “temperamentally unfit” for the presidency, Trump responded by saying it was Clinton who “does not have the temperament to be president.”

On and on it went. His routine response, even now, to inquiries into his and his aides’ ties to Russia: They should investigate the Clintons’ Russia ties.

We’ve seen this pattern in the early months of the presidency as well — accusing the Democrats of seeking a government shutdown when it was his own late demands that threatened to upend a bipartisan spending bill, and now, when accused of lying by the former FBI director, calling that man a liar.

There’s no doubt Trump’s rubber-and-glue strategy has worked. He is, after all, the president. But can the man who has established himself as one of history’s most prodigious prevaricators convince the country that the former FBI director, celebrated for his integrity, is just another lying liar? Polls before and after Comey’s testimony suggest Trump is losing that contest.

After all, who are you going to believe? Trump? Or everybody else?

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