Why?

Shannon Bohrer

(4/2017) "It was the best of times and it was the worst of times…." Depending on your perspective

During the primaries, then candidate Donald Trump said that if he lost the election it would be because of voter fraud. Then he won the election and he now says that 3 to 5 million votes were fraudulently cast and all of the fraudulent votes were cast for Hillary. According to his logic, he would have won the popular vote if not for voter fraud. President Trump cited the Pew studies to justify his claims of voter fraud. But the Pew studies, which do exist, never examined voter fraud. What is the issue?

The idea of wide spread voter fraud has been raised numerous times and the Trump administration continues to defend it. Even with the responses by election officials around the country that the voter fraud described by the Trump Administration does not exist, the false claims persist. The responses from around the country and numerous studies tell us that voter fraud does exist, but the fraud is usually in the single digit numbers, not millions.

Then, after the voter fraud issue seemed to go away, it was not mentioned for several days - it came back. On a Sunday morning talk show President Trump made the claim that buses from Massachusetts carried illegal voters to New Hampshire where they voted in the presidential election. He made these claims with no evidence. Then White House adviser Stephen Miller went on national television and repeated the administration's unfounded claims of voter fraud in New Hampshire. When pressed for evidence, Steven Miller said: "I can tell you that this issue of busing voters into New Hampshire is widely known by anyone who's worked in New Hampshire politics. It's very real. It's very serious."

In response to this claim of "Voter Fraud in New Hampshire" the former New Hampshire GOP chairman Fergus Cullen offered a $1,000 reward for evidence of a single illegal vote from the state of Massachusetts. The offer was repeated in the national news media and no one collected the reward. As Mr. Fergus Cullen said, "The idea that people are coming to New Hampshire to commit fraud on a massive scale like this is just preposterous and it needs to be called out as untrue."

We seem to have an administration that projects untruths, false and/or unsubstantiated claims, on numerous topics. It is not unusual for people to have various perspectives of an event. Sometimes words are spoken that can have several meanings. A gathering or demonstration can be an exercise of free speech and with a few words or disruptions the same gathering it can be viewed as a riot. But what is unusual is that when the President and his administration make false statements that are refuted – and they continue to make them. Facts are facts and science is science. Saying something repeatedly does not make it true.

The question we should be asking is why? If the facts don’t add up, why restate them? Why are we being told that the administration’s truths are different? What is the motivation, or is there motivation?

The White House seems to have problems with multiple facts beyond the voter fraud issue. These "alternative facts" continue to appear, so you have to ask why? In this day and age with instant news and multiple fact check reference sites why would this pattern of behavior even exist – let alone continue? Is there a benefit? After the stories have been refuted - do people still believe them?

When talking to a group of police administrators the President repeatedly talked about the increases in murders and violent crime. He said that homicides in the U.S. are at a 47 year high, when they are actually low. The homicide rate did go up for one year, but it is at a 51 year low. Crime is at a 57 year low. Since this information is so available why do the alternative facts keep being used?

When the press does challenge the President, he tells us that the press is to blame and that you can’t trust the media. The media does have its bias’s and the biases are on both sides, but in general terms the media does get the facts, not the alternative facts but the facts. In fact when the media does get it wrong, they say so. It is good to have a healthy skepticism of the media, but the media is not "the enemy of the state."

"If you tell the same lie enough times, people will believe it; and the bigger the lie, the better. " Joseph Goebbels.

The administration even accused the media of not covering terrorist attacks. From my perspective there are many times the media covers the story too much, but rarely too little. A trump spokesperson Ms. Conway, said the media was unaware of the "Bowling Green massacre," because they failed to cover it. As she said "Most people don’t know that because it didn’t get covered." Of course the reason the media did not cover the story, was because there was no massacre.

When President Trump was told by the intelligence community that Russia interfered in the election and the purpose was to discredit Secretary Clinton, he consistently did not believe it. In doing so he basically said that our intelligence community had made mistakes before, so there was a reason to mistrust them. Why would someone with no evidence of voter fraud, consistency say that 3 to 5 million illegals voted fraudulently for Secretary Hillary? Conversely, when told by 17 intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in our election – he disbelieved the intelligence report(s).

Does President Trump have some unknown connections to Russia and President Putin that we don’t know about? President Trump’s wife Melania was born in Slovina, which had been part of Yugoslavia. This was before the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Marshall Tito ruled Yugoslavia, which was a satellite state of the USSR. Melania’s father Viktor Knavs was a registered Communist. Maybe Melania is a Manchurian candidate? Why has this not been reported? Maybe because it ranks right up there with Obama being born in Kenya. Except for the Manchurian candidate, the rest is true.

"Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play." Joseph Goebbels

We have heard from the media that President Trump likes to have competing sides. We have also heard that he uses the outlandish comments to distract from other issues. The problem with both of these theories is just that, they are theories. When the president tells us we cannot trust the government and we can’t trust the press, then he and his administration espouse false narratives – I think the problem is deeper than we realize.

"The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one." Adolf Hitler

Why?