Fareed Zakaria says he wasn’t using the label “bullsh** artist” lightly when he used it to describe Donald Trump.
Zakaria, host of GPS on CNN, received both flak and praise earlier in the week when he said Trump continuously tries to clarify his positions with “a tweet or a statement… it’s sort of amusing to watch — how’s he going to pull it off this time? What is he going to argue? Usually he adds that the press hates him. But there’s a term for this kind of thing. This is the mode of a bullsh** artist,” Zakaria told Wolf Blitzer.
Zakaria took to his show to explain why he decided to use this term to describe the Republican presidential nominee. “He boasts and boasts and boasts about his business, his buildings, his books, his wives; much of it is a concoction of hyperbole and falsehood. And, when he is found out, he’s like that guy we have all met making wild claims at the bar, who when confronted by the truth quickly responds, ‘I knew that.'” Zakaria said.
One of the examples Zakaria points to is the “non-relationship” between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. At the National Press Club in May 2014, Trump said he spoke to Putin, who “could not have been nicer.” During the Fox Business and Wall Street Journal debate in November 2015, Trump said he got to know Putin “very well.”
“Did Trump really believe that you can say something like that on live TV and no one would check? Did he think that no one would notice that the ’60 Minutes’ show consisted of two separate prerecorded interviews with Putin in Moscow, and Trump in New York? By that logic I’ve gotten to know Franklin Roosevelt very well because I’ve run some clips of him on my television show. In fact, it was just BS.” Zakaria quips.
Another issue that Zakaria brings up is the one that fueled Trump’s political rise: President Barack Obama “birtherism” conspiracy theories. In 2011, Trump said that he had sent investigators to Hawaii and “they cannot believe what they’re finding.”
“For weeks, Trump continued to imply that there were huge findings to be released soon…. That was five years ago, in April 2011. Nothing happened. It appears highly unlikely that Trump sent investigators to Hawaii in the first place,” Zakaria says.
“As the crazy talk continues, standard rules of fact, truth, and reality, have disappeared in this campaign. Donald Trump has piled such vast quantities of his trademark product into the political arena that the stench is now overwhelming and unbearable,” Zakaria says.