All the things they say about Trump are lies. And in The 21 Biggest Lies, Schlichter sets them up and knocks them down like mechanical ducks at an arcade.
Having read Julie Kelly’s excellent Disloyal Opposition on Saturday, Sunday I turned my attention to Kurt Schlichter’s latest The 21 Biggest Lies About Donald Trump (and you!).
And let me tell you, I picked the wrong weekend to increase my core exercises. There’s nothing so painful as uproariously laughing when your ab muscles are super sore. All day yesterday, the silence in my house was broken by the repeated sound of me saying, “HahahahahaOw!!!!”
The 21 Biggest Lies is flat-out hilarious. If you’re a fan of Kurt’s columns at Townhall, you will love this book. It is a masterpiece – and not just because there are belly-laughs (OW!) a-plenty.
Several years ago, I pointed out that if Donald Trump was really this evil monster the media and the Resistance😂 claim, they wouldn’t need to lie about him all the time. If he was really a boorish oaf who makes a fool of himself when traveling abroad, CNN wouldn’t have had to edit the video of Trump feeding the koi in Japan to make him look like he’s a boorish oaf.
Know what I mean?
All the things they say about Trump are lies. And in The 21 Biggest Lies, Schlichter sets them up and knocks them down like mechanical ducks at an arcade.
After the deadly Tree of Life shooting back in 2018, President and First Lady Trump went to Pittsburgh to pay their condolences and meet with the rabbi and families. Two Washington Post reporters set the Twitter Resistance in a tizzy with these tweets:
Holy smokes did the Resistance have a collective cow.
Reading through the replies had me rolling my eyes so hard, they got stuck in the back of my head.
The Resistance, the Democrats, and their handmaids in the media have created this fictitious Monster Trump who exists only in their fevered minds and on the pages of their newspapers. Their Trump is the media-created, Made-For-TV Trump of CNN and MSNBC.
While the media focused like a laser on the handful of Resistance shrews “protesting” the Trumps’ visit to Tree of Life, the real life Trump was gracious, kind, and comforting. In fact, when he and Melania stopped at the hospital to visit the injured, the welcome from hospital personnel and visitors was just beautiful. And, unsurprisingly, not included in the cable news reports.
The Monster Trump is a lie. He doesn’t exist.
And when you take the time to cut through the shrieking invectives and look at reality, the 21 biggest lies about Donald Trump (and us!) fall apart like a cheap sweater in the spin cycle.
And that is precisely what Kurt Schlichter’s book does.
When you read Schlichter’s book, do NOT skip the Introduction. That’s my first word of advice. One thing I’ve learned about Kurt Schlichter from reading the Kelly Turnbull novels, the preface and introductions are absolute gems. And Kurt uses the intro to The 21 Biggest Lies like an attorney making his opening statement.
And as he wraps up the intro, Kurt bottom-lines it for us:
If we don’t dispute their lies, accusations soon become verdicts.
Exactly.
Every lie has its own chapter. And each chapter takes a howitzer to the lie.
His chapter “Trump is a Warmonger … and So Are All You Bloodthirsty Monsters!” doesn’t just dispense with the warmonger lie, it also contains the best breakdown of Trump’s foreign policy I’ve ever read.
Jacksonian. It’s all about Jacksonian.
Chapter 10, “Trump is Not a Real Conservative … and Neither Are You, No Matter What You Actually Think!” brilliantly defines conservatism and explains in no uncertain terms exactly how Beltway “conservatives” failed it.
Of course, not being tuned into the conservative ideology echo chamber allowed Trump to avoid GOP indoctrination. Instead of rattling off a list of ideologically informed positions, Trump assessed issues one at a time and went with his gut feeling.
Maybe that gut feeling was what conservatism had been missing all along. Maybe conservative ideology had fallen out of touch with reality, and no longer addressed real peoples’ problems anymore. And maybe it was the most unlikely person of all, Donald Trump, who was actually more conservative than the conservatives themselves.
Schlichter then goes on to explain in the simplest, most obvious way what conservatism is, and how the Big Brain Set at Conservative, Inc lost the script.
An ideology no one will vote for is dead, and a party with a dead ideology will soon be dead too. Trump made conservatism relevant again by talking about the issues people cared about, and he brought accountability back by holding the feet of Washington failures to the fire.
There is just a lot of damn good stuff in this book. I ran out of Post-It Notes when I reviewed Julie’s book, so my copy of The 21 Biggest Lies was stuffed with torn pieces of note paper marking all the places I underlined or starred for my edification.
Though, I doubt my Dad will appreciate that I marked up my copy since I’ll be loaning it to him now that I’ve read it. But I will remove the torn pieces of paper before I pass it on to him.
Naturally, after reading Kurt’s book, I wanted to bounce some questions off of him. And given how much I love the Kelly Turnbull novels, it shouldn’t come as a galloping shock that I quickly shifted gears to the man I wish was real so I could marry him.
First off, I loved The 21 Biggest Lies. Loved it! I’m sure you could have made it The 72 Biggest Lies about Donald Trump (and You!) and still wouldn’t have covered all the lies. What made you settle on these twenty-one lies specifically?
There were so many lies to choose from it was kind of hard. I wanted to do a greatest hits of liberal bologna and deception. But I could do a sequel!
You point out in Chapter One: “But it’s not baloney to the liars. To them, it’s not even truth. It’s more like a premise, a foundational notion upon which all the other stupid notions they hold dear are built. As a result, the notion does not rely upon evidence or argument.”
I know you didn’t write this to convince the lunatics. I mean, we can’t convince these people of anything because Truth doesn’t matter; Facts and Evidence don’t matter. So what is your objective/target audience in writing this book?
I want to give normal people a handbook for dealing with liars. I’m trial lawyer so I can’t do it all the time but most people don’t. We have a tendency to default, to assume that these people are acting in good faith and if we just make a good faith argument we can convince them. But that’s not so with these guys. Their only goal is power. If you understand that you stop arguing with them and start using your own power again.
Okay, I’m gonna shift gears here – mostly because this spring I had to reread the first four Kelly Turnbull novels and I need a new Kelly fix. When is Crisis coming out?
This fall! Probably November!
Yay!
Any chance of Kelly Turnbull’s adventures making it to the big screen? I’ve already cast Adam Baldwin as Kelly Turnbull, but that’s because Adam’s character Jane Cobb (from “Firefly”) is the picture I have in my head when I read your books.
I think they would make fun movies, but most people in Hollywood are too scared to do something so un-PC.
Given the current climate, what with the Wuhan Panic and now the groveling Racial Freakout, even your fiction books about the People’s Republic are taking on a very non-fiction vibe. Are you Nostradamus? How the hell did you create a fictional world that the Left seems hell-bent on turning into reality?
I imagined the most ridiculous things imaginable, though I saw there was no reason why any of them would not eventually come true considering the nonsense of the left.
One last question. It’s an easy one! Who is your favorite character in the Turnbull novels?
Wow. I like them all, or I wouldn’t write them! I always wrote the books to amuse myself. It’s kind of funny to me that other people like them too!
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Get your copy of The 21 Biggest Lies About Donald Trump (and you!).
Honestly you guys, it’s phenomenal.
And, while you’re at it, check out Kurt’s latest Townhall column
“Why You Should Be Optimistic About Trump Winning.”
Between The 21 Biggest Lies and Julie’s book Disloyal Opposition, you’ve got some great summer reading material. Definitely buy both!
