Trump and the truth: Why his version resonates with voters...

On Friday, the Republican establishment and the mainstream media got terrible news: Donald Trump had doubled his lead over his nearest rival from 10 points to 20 points.

This came on the heels of a week of Trump bashing by the political establishment (and we have to include the mainstream media in this bloc) that celebrated the businessman-turned-politician’s “inevitable” self-destruction as he continued to defend his aggressive stance against Islamic terrorism.

But what is going up in flames is not Trump’s campaign, but the credibility of the talking heads who hate him so much. Indeed, Trump’s 36 percent support in the new CNN/ORC International poll is the highest he has ever recorded since surging to the top of the Republican pack in July.

Meanwhile, the establishment favorites (the GOP candidates deemed serious enough — i.e., liberal enough — to be president) have largely slipped into asterisk territory. King Jeb has shed his frontrunner mask and now languishes at 3 percent. Krazy John Kasich has turned his “scorched earth” attack on the Republican base into a whopping 2 percent support among GOP voters.

So what’s going on?

This new CNN poll was taken entirely after Trump first announced at a Nov. 21 rally in Alabama that he remembered seeing “thousands and thousands of people [that] were cheering” in New Jersey as the World Trade Center buildings collapsed.

Indeed, the polling didn’t commence until Nov. 27, after nearly a week of reporting by networks, cable news channels — even MTV — that Trump was wrong about thinking thousands of Muslims in New Jersey had celebrated the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Of course, there’s virtually no chance that Trump is factually correct in his recollection. If thousands of people had been celebrating the 9/11 terror attacks in New Jersey, someone else beside Trump would have remembered it.

The best theory suggests that Trump, like NBC news anchor Brian Williams before him, “conflated” two memories and came up with his false memory. The whole world did watch as hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinians marched to celebrate the attack on America. Meanwhile, in New Jersey, dozens, if not hundreds, of Muslims also celebrated the same thing. There were TV reports about both of these anti-American activities, and somehow Trump got them mixed up.

But what is fascinating is that no one who is prone to vote for Trump cares whether his statement is factually accurate. For

See 2 CENTS, D7

once I will give credit to Stephen Colbert for coming up with the concept of “truthiness,” which he defined as “something that seems like truth — the truth we want to exist.”

In Trump’s case, it might also represent “the truth we don’t want to admit exists, but which we worry is true nonetheless, and which we don’t think anyone else will deal with.”

Clearly, thousands of Muslims were not dancing on the streets in Jersey City on 9/11, but why would they? Even if they secretly supported the work of the terrorists in striking a mighty blow against “the great Satan,” they would not be stupid enough to publicly announce that support.

But there is also no doubt that not just thousands, but hundreds of thousands of Muslims across the United States and the world have sworn an oath to Islam that takes precedence over any national loyalty. That may not be politically correct to state, but if there are 5 million Muslims in the United States, it is safe to assume based on surveys that at several hundred thousand of them believe in imposing sharia law. Some of them, as we know from experience, also believe in violent jihad.

New Jersey is the state with the second largest concentration of Muslims, and it is not coincidental that participants in both the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center lived in Jersey City and other cities in north Jersey. Those connections led to a number of news reports and police investigations into anti-American sentiment among New Jersey Muslims immediately following the September 11 attacks.

You may have heard of the report on WCBS-TV news from Sept. 16, 2001, in which Guzman reported first on the raid of an apartment that was the home of two Jersey City Muslims who were suspected of being the “20th and 21st” hijackers, and then said “...There’s another apartment building [in Jersey City], one that an investigator told me, quote ‘is swarming with suspects.’ Suspects whom I’m told were cheering on the roof when they saw the planes slam into the Trade Center.

“...police were called to the building by other neighbors and found eight men celebrating — six of them tenants in the building. The FBI and other terrorist task force agencies that arrived and the older investigators on the task force recall that they had been to this building before — eight years ago when the first World Trade Center attack led them to Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, whose Jersey City mosques lies between the two buildings getting attention today.”

You can watch the full report online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3auKMHkZJnQ.

Other connections to New Jersey are numerous. Six of the 9/11 hijackers either lived in New Jersey or visited there. A woman from Jersey City called in two bomb threats to the White House in the days after the terror attacks. According to an AP report from Sept. 17, datelined Newark, N.J., “at least 13 New Jerseyans [had] been taken into custody in the investigation of the plane hijackings that destroyed the World Trade Center towers and damaged the Pentagon.” By Sept. 18, 2001, FBI director Robert Mueller announced that a total of 49 people had been detained for questioning so far.

What is remarkable is that by the time the investigation was over, the only person brought up on charges was Zacarias Moussaoui, who was coincidentally in jail in Minnesota when the 9/11 hijackings occurred due to his arrest on immigration charges related to his flight training. Everyone else was either cleared or just vanished from the records, and so we are left with the supposition that either the terrorists were a very closed-mouth bunch who never communicated with anyone about their plans, or that someone decided it was not politically correct to pursue charges against the living when there were already 19 dead hijackers to take the blame.

Sounds far-fetched until you remember that the Bush administration loaded a plane with relatives of Osama bin Laden in the first days after 9/11 and evacuated them to Saudi Arabia. Check it out for yourself from CBS News (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bin-laden-family-evacuated).

All of this may seem like ancient history until you read today’s news. Call it al-Qaida or call it ISIS, but there is a plot afoot to topple not just our tallest towers, but also our government, our way of life, and our peace of mind. The San Bernardino terror attacks prove that we are not safe, and if Donald Trump’s claim about how many Muslims were celebrating in New Jersey after 9/11 can’t be verified, he at least has shown an inclination to fight for his country and to protect us from a known threat.

Compare that to the words of President Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the FBI in the immediate hours and days after Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik killed 14 people and injured dozens more in San Bernardino. While the rest of the world understood what had happened immediately, the president and his gang said they could not be sure it was terrorism. Perhaps it was just “workplace violence” such as was experienced in Fort Hood when a Muslim doctor shouted “Allahu Akhbar” and shot up his fellow soldiers. Heck, for two days, the FBI was trying to figure out whether or not Farook and Malik had been “radicalized,” apparently not thinking 14 dead bodies was good enough evidence.

To coin a phrase that builds on Colbert’s “truthiness”: Who is more truthworthy? Trump or Obama? As always, you decide.

As for Lynch, she takes the cake. A day after the San Bernardino massacre, the attorney general was the speaker at the Muslim Advocates’ 10th anniversary dinner. She said that her “greatest fear as a prosecutor” is the “incredibly disturbing rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric” in America. Fourteen dead, and she’s worried about rhetoric. Do you think the mainstream media will hold her to account for her words? Probably not, but I bet Donald Trump will.