Trump’s Communications Director lies on her way out the door

The White House Director of Communications, Alyssa Farah, quit yesterday, seeing as how her services won’t be needed or wanted any longer with a new and competent administration about to take power. President Biden will want a competent person to hold that position, not an unqualified lying propagandist.

I wasn’t sure if Farah was what I just called her, or maybe was actually a decent human being and valuable communications expert we might want to keep around. Given how at every opportunity, Donald Trump — with alarming skill and regularity — chose the most unqualified and worst people around to fill out the executive branch, chances of the latter were slim.

And now they’re none at all — here’s a bit from Farah’s statement of resignation:

“Under this Administration, the ISIS caliphate was destroyed, American hostages were returned home, NATO is stronger than ever, we’ve brokered historic Middle East peace deals, and I was on the ground in Kabul for the announcement of a historic peace deal between the Afghan Government and the Taliban aimed at ending America’s longest war.”

(WaPo)

Practically everything in this statement is a lie. ISIS has not been destroyed, it still exists today and will continue to exist into 2021. Damaged? Yes. Significant weakened? Yes. Harmless and completely gone? Not a chance. This isn’t an exaggeration, it’s a lie: ISIS has not been destroyed.

American hostages have been returned home, that is true. But it’s true of virtually every administration. Every President works to bring home Americans being held hostage overseas, as Americans end up being taken hostage overseas quite frequently and is a constant problem that will never have a permanent resolution. In all likelihood, these people would have been brought home regardless of who was president over the past four years.

NATO is not “stronger than ever.” In fact, NATO has not changed even marginally since 2016. Trump made a lot of pointless demands of NATO countries to increase their defense spending, mostly because he didn’t understand how any of it actually worked. No NATO countries significantly increased their spending, and those that did increase it at all, Trump regularly inflated the amount to absurd levels to make it appear meaningful. The plain and simple truth is that nothing has changed with NATO under the Trump administration. There was nothing wrong with it to begin with, Trump’s demanded changes were absurd and based on his ignorance of what those countries obligations were, and none of those changes were ever made.

There have not been any Middle East peace deals, much less historic ones. It’s been a common lie among the outgoing Trump loyalists to pretend that they’ve solved the Middle East peace problem (i.e. everyone in the region hates Israel), but no such thing has happened. Palestinians hate us quite a bit more now than before because as Republicans tend to do, the Trump administration has bent over backwards to do everything within their power to benefit the government of Israel (not so much benefit the Israeli people) even when it actively damages the foreign policy interests of the United States (which is why American Jews vote overwhelmingly for Democratic presidential candidates every election.)

Under Donald Trump, the United States has completely abandoned peace between Israel and Palestine, destroyed American goodwill with Palestinians, and abandoned the two-state solution that’s supported by every country on the planet except Israel (and in the past, the United States for generations has preferred that solution to all others.)

The supposed “historic” “peace deal between Afghanistan and the Taliban is a very odd claim to make for Republicans, who have regularly campaigned on being the only people in America/the World who know how to destroy the Taliban (which they still call terrorists with regularity). It is indisputable that the Taliban are terrorists and that the Trump administration negotiated (rightly or wrongly) with those terrorists in order to try making peace with them rather than destroying them. (Whether that was the right and good thing to do remains to be seen.) And it wasn’t all that long ago that Republicans like George W. Bush took false credit for “destroying” the Taliban the same way Donald Trump is pretending that he has “destroyed” ISIS.

I would say based just on this one lone paragraph in Farah’s parting statement that it’s probably best for everyone that she leave her post now, and make room for a competent spokesperson that isn’t an unskilled and pathetic liar and propagandist like she is.