No. We can excuse Alan's ignorance, he's just a bored and ill-informed keyboard warrior from NJ.
But not Trump's. We can't excuse his lies. The Orange Menace doesn't "think this stuff is true", he knows he's telling lies, yet he does it anyway, daily. Thousands of them. Mostly transparently idiotic.
Only the ignorant, those with something to gain from pretending to believe, or the gullible believe these lies. Seventy-odd million of them, apparently. A sad reflection on America.
I am a reasonably cynical former newspaper reporter who covered a lot of crime and government and I've actually seen how the sausage gets made, and I am constantly amazed by my naive inability to simply accept Trump as a criminal. I don't want him to be a criminal because I love the US and I hate to think that we had a dirtbag like that as President. But, to the news:
I was shocked all over again by a Sunday NYT story about how Trump and his campaign cynically ripped off his own supporters in an effort to raise campaign funds in the waning weeks of the election. In their election appeals, scattered far and wide by the internet, they "pre-checked" a small, obscure box that made voluntary one-time campaign donations recurring. So somebody would donate $100 or something, and only much later find out that the $100 was coming out of their bank account on a weekly basis and sometimes more often. Given the financial status of most of his supporters, this was a truly evil thing to do.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/us/politics/trump-donations.htmlHere's a quote from the opening first few paragraphs:
Stacy Blatt was in hospice care last September listening to Rush Limbaugh’s dire warnings about how badly Donald J. Trump’s campaign needed money when he went online and chipped in everything he could: $500. It was a big sum for a 63-year-old battling cancer and living in Kansas City on less than $1,000 per month. But that single contribution — federal records show it was his first ever — quickly multiplied. Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500 the next week and every week through mid-October, without his knowledge — until Mr. Blatt’s bank account had been depleted and frozen. When his utility and rent payments bounced, he called his brother, Russell, for help. What the Blatts soon discovered was $3,000 in withdrawals by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days. They called their bank and said they thought they were victims of fraud...