Projecting lies

Watching Fox News ahead of Wednesday’s impeachment vote, President Trump gave a Twitter call out to one of his most combative allies in the House.

In his tweet, Mr. Trump quoted approvingly from what Representative Doug Collins, Republican of Georgia, had said on “Fox & Friends” about the two impeachment articles passed by the House — that they were the product of Democrats who “couldn’t find any crimes so they did a vague abuse of power and abuse of Congress, which every administration from the beginning has done.”

But in fact, Mr. Collins never made the claim that “abuse of power and abuse of Congress” were common practices of past administrations.

“They simply wanted to get at the president,” Mr. Collins had actually said. “So they said at the end of the day, we can’t form any crimes. We’re going to have a vague abuse of power. And while we’re at it, let’s just throw in abuse of — obstruction of Congress because we didn’t get our way.”

[...]

Mr. Trump has made a habit of injecting his own words into the comments of people he sees on television and then publishing them as direct quotes on Twitter, where he has more than 67 million followers.

[...]

When Ken Starr, the former independent counsel, appeared on Fox News last month, he noted that Gordon D. Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, had testified that efforts to pressure the Ukrainians to conduct investigations into Mr. Trump’s rivals did amount to a quid pro quo.

But when Mr. Trump quoted Mr. Starr on his Twitter feed, he replaced that part with a phrase suggesting just the opposite.

“Ambassador Sondland’s testimony stated that President Trump said the Ukraine President should just do the right thing (No Quid Pro Quo),” Mr. Trump wrote.

[...]

Another time in November, Mr. Trump heard Jason D. Meister, an adviser to his campaign, tick off a list of his accomplishments on Fox News. “He’s done so many great things,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter, purporting to quote Mr. Meister. “He’s devastated ISIS & killed AlBaghdadi, building Wall.’”

While Mr. Meister did talk about the Islamic State and the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, its leader, he never mentioned the president’s efforts to build a wall across the southwestern border.

More often than not, the allies who Mr. Trump misquotes do little to publicly contradict him.

[...]

“I have regularly tried to reach out to Fox News guests that he has misquoted,” said Daniel Dale, a fact checker for CNN who, along with his colleague Tara Subramaniam, has compared all of Mr. Trump’s tweets against video clips of the people he quotes. “I can’t recall someone ever responding. In general, Trump allies just let the creative additions stand.”

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University who studies authoritarianism and propaganda, called the tactic a “power play.”

“He’s challenging them to correct him,” she said. “This is how a cult of personality works. The leader will say something that everyone knows is wrong, and no one will correct him.”

[...]

Mr. Trump told reporters that Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, had told him after he read the transcript [of Trump's call to Zelensky] that it “was the most innocent phone call that I’ve read.”

Mr. McConnell later denied making the comment, saying at a news conference that he had “not had any conversations on that subject” with Mr. Trump.

But other Republicans have said nothing when Mr. Trump appeared to have wrongly quoted them. The president said, for example, that Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, had described the call as “perfect” — a word the president uses repeatedly to describe his own conduct.

If Mr. Scott also used that word, it wasn’t in public.

“We’ve all seen it. We saw the transcript, we saw what the whistle-blower put out. I don’t see what they’re talking about,” Mr. Scott had said on Fox News, defending the president but not using his chosen word, “perfect.”

[...]

“It represents his will to market, to frame reality, to make the world appear as he wishes, despite reality,” [Jennifer R. Mercieca, a historian at Texas A&M University who specializes in American political rhetoric,] said. “He counts on his followers being so gullible and so cynical that they won’t doubt the reality that he has constructed for them.”

  NYT

Mores simply, this is what a narcissist does all the time. They rephrase what they've heard into what they want to have heard when they retell it.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.