President Trump claimed today that Christine Blasey Ford‘s allegation of aggressive sexual misconduct by a teenaged Brett Kavanaugh, among other similar testimonies and recollections, was “all made up,” “fabricated“, “a hoax” and “a disgrace.”

“Many people are worried, rightly, about what the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh means for America in the long term. He’s a naked partisan who clearly lied under oath about many aspects of his personal history; that’s as important as, and related to, the question of what he did to Christine Blasey Ford, a question that remains unresolved because the supposed investigation was such a transparent sham. Putting such a man on the Supreme Court has, at a stroke, destroyed the court’s moral authority for the foreseeable future.

“But such long-term worries should be a secondary concern right now. The more immediate threat comes from what we saw on the Republican side during and after the hearing: not just contempt for the truth, but also a rush to demonize any and all criticism. In particular, the readiness with which senior Republicans embraced crazy conspiracy theories about the opposition to Kavanaugh is a deeply scary warning about what might happen to America, not in the long run, but just a few weeks from now.” — from “The Paranoid Style in G.O.P. Politics,” a Paul Krugman opinion piece, posted in the N.Y. Times on 10.8.18.