Trump: In LA the governor of California, the mayor—they're incompetent and they paid troublemakers, agitators and insurrectionists, they're engaged in this willful attempt to nullify federal law and aid the occupation of the city by criminal invaders pic.twitter.com/oxMjbNgKiX
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 10, 2025
It wasn’t a slip of the tongue. It wasn’t a misquote. It wasn’t context lost in translation. Donald Trump stood at a podium at Fort Bragg, declared that California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass were paying agitators to incite violence in the protests. Hours later, when asked directly by reporters, he denied ever saying it. “No, I don’t say the governor and the mayor,” Trump muttered, “I said, somebody’s paying them, I think.”
This isn’t just a contradiction. It’s a pattern. And it’s a strategy.
Trump and his administration lie not in spite of being caught, but because they know they’ll be caught. The lie isn’t meant to deceive in the conventional sense. It’s meant to degrade our shared understanding of reality. One version of events gets pumped out through the rally speech, the next version delivered at the press conference, and a third—clipped, captioned, and conspiratorial—is posted to Homeland Security’s official channels. “California politicians must call off their rioting mob,” their tweet blared, echoing Trump’s fantasy hours after he’d publicly disavowed it.
WATCH: DHS drone footage of LA rioters.
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) June 10, 2025
This is not calm. This is not peaceful.
California politicians must call off their rioting mob. pic.twitter.com/WHNPlzEJG8
This is gaslighting at a national scale. The lie doesn’t aim to persuade. It aims to control.
Trump’s technique is lifted straight from the fascist playbook. Say something incendiary. Deny it later. Blame the media for misreporting. Watch the base double down. The goal isn’t coherence. It’s chaos. The faithful will believe both that Trump accused Newsom and Bass and that he didn’t. Both that protesters are paid Soros goons and that Trump respects peaceful dissent. The contradiction doesn’t undermine him; it inoculates him. He is always right—regardless of what he said.
This isn’t new, but it’s becoming more dangerous. The deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles, the floating of Marine involvement, the vilification of local officials. It’s all being lubricated by a propaganda machine that lies in real time, then lies about the lies, while accusing everyone else of lying.
When the state denies its own words, it denies accountability. It erases the very possibility of truth. That’s not just fascism—it’s nihilism.
And that, ultimately, is the point. To blur cause and effect. To render facts irrelevant. To turn every discussion into a debate about whether something happened, rather than what should be done about it.
So why does Trump lie like this?
Because it works.
Because it signals dominance.
And because in his America, truth isn’t something to be upheld—it’s something to be broken.
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