Trump and honesty

The Atlantic piece's title is "The Dangerous Confusion of Trump's Celebrity Fans". The headline is not promising if, like me, you're irritated by clickbait and you're especially irritated when you fall for it. However, the first paragraph included a howler:

Shania Twain, the Canadian country-pop pioneer, told The Guardian that if she could have participated in the U.S. election, she would have voted for Trump because “even though he was offensive, he seemed honest.”

Left unsaid, at least in the piece, is whether she still thinks so.

I assume Twain did mean "honest", but I think she did not recognize to what she really was responding. What I suspect she liked about Donnie was not his honesty, but his willingness not to edit himself.

Because even the fiercest supporter of our domestic Dear Leader cannot call him "honest" in the sense of "faithful to the truth". He is only "honest" in that he blurts out whatever's currently on his mind, whether it bears any resemblance to reality or not.

It's one thing to blurt out uncomfortable truths for other people's good. If you have a body-odor problem, it might take an uncomfortably frank conversation with a close friend or family member to effect a change.

It's another thing entirely simply to be offensive for the sake of being offensive. That is most often — nearly all the time, really — what Dear Leader is. It's an effective way to achieve a couple of his perpetual goals: focusing everyone's attention on him, and taking people's minds off of situations that are triggering uncomfortable questions for him.

Dear Leader is blunt, indifferent to civility, and uninterested in truth. In other words, he's anything but honest.