Please stop calling this bad messaging. That misses the point and nature of what Trump's people are doing. /1
Nielsen's shifting story follows a familiar pattern in Trumpland: it shifts depending on who she's talking to. Different audiences get different lies. That's not accidental or inept. /2
The first two comments were aimed at a general audience that doesn't like the policy. The 3rd was aimed at a convention of sheriffs. None of these comments were off the cuff. /3
And it's not just that they lie for different audiences. They lie for the sake of lying. They lie to make our heads spin. This is what autocratic regimes do. I mean, this is exactly the kind of behavior @sarahkendzior has been warning us about for 3 years. /4
Team Trump spews out the kind of aggressively transparent self-contradictory bullshit spewed by autocratic regimes worldwide
twitter: comms fail lol
No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no
/5
twitter: comms fail lol
No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no
/5
Trump himself famously gears his lies to whoever is sitting in front of him. The parts of his personality disorder that make him a compulsive salesman also make him a natural autocrat (along with every other aspect of his personality disorder). /6
And he's created a WH and cabinet that do as he does. His personality disorder is incorporated into his administration. Manipulative, aggressive, sadistic, dehumanizing… the list goes on. /7 
A lot of us laughed off candidate Trump's demagoguery as incompetent messaging. Overlooked how many people wanted to hear it and how the press would treat it as spectacle. Calling him a clown gave a lot of us false hope then. We should know better now. /8
It's not just the lying, of course. The open corruption, the unpopular policies, the attack on voting rights — they're all trees in the same forest: he’s an autocrat. The GOP is helping him. It's all out in plain sight. We do his work for him when we obscure this. /9
