Trump passed the milestone of 3,000 false or misleading claims as president, uttering his 3,001st on May 1, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker reported. That works out to nearly 6.5 false claims per day since Trump took the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2017. And his pace of lying has picked up. In his first 100 days in the White House, he averaged 4.9 false claims a day. After 406 days in office, as of March 1, he had raised his mendacity average to six false claims a day. In the following two months, he told an average of nine false claims a day, raising his overall mendacity average to 6.5 lies per day.
Lying Donnie tells lies at such a pace that it is difficult for fact checkers to keep up with him. In effect, he runs over the truth and dares the media to try to make him tell the truth.
His record of mendacity is bloated by his tendency to repeat, over and over, many of his false statements, even after being corrected. He apparently is following the fascist playbook, which advises that a Big Lie repeated enough times will be believed by the masses. The Post has counted at least 113 different false claims Trump has repeated three or more times — and some with breathtaking frequency, such as the 72 times he has claimed he passed the biggest tax cut in history, when in fact it ranks in eighth place. At least 53 times the president has made some variant of the claim that the Russia probe is a “phony, made-up witchhunt,” with the repeated refrain that there is “no collusion,” despite the indictment of Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Manafort’s business partner, Rick Gates, former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopolous, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and 13 Russian citizens and three Russian entities.
Trump has continued to downplay the investigation of his campaign’s ties with Russia, despite the fact that special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe so far has produced guilty pleas from Papadopolous, for making false statements to FBI agents about contacts he had with Russian agents while working for the Trump campaign in 2016. Gates reportedly is cooperating with investigators. Gates has pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the US and making a false statement to federal gents. Flynn also pleaded guilty to “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the FBI, and later announced he is cooperating with Mueller’s investigation and “working to set things right.” Mueller also has gained guilty pleas from Richard Pinedo, a Southern California computer science major who set up bank accounts for shadowy entities that turned out to include a Russian operation that used social media platforms to sow political discord around the 2016 presidential election, and Dutch attorney Alex van der Zwaan, a son-in-law of a Russian oligarch, who admitted he lied to federal investigators about his contacts with a Trump campaign officials.
Then there is the notorious Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016, with Don Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort and at least five other people, including Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who was represented as a “Russian government attorney” with official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary Clinton. Veselnitskaya later stated that she was not a government official, though she was known to have ties to the Russian government and she later described herself as an “informant” to the office of the Russian prosecutor general.
As Jonathan Chait noted at New York Magazine, “You have a Russian agent dangling Russian assistance in the election (‘part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump’), and the offer of help being accepted (‘if it’s what you say I love it’). It doesn’t even matter to what degree or even whether the offer was actually followed through. If you take a meeting to plan a crime, and the crime later happens and you benefit, you are an accessory to the crime whether or not you participated after the meeting.” Kushner later failed to report the meeting with Veselnitskaya, or other meetings with the Russian ambassador to the US and the head of a Russian bank that was subject to US sanctions, in his initial request for a security clearance as a special adviser to the president.
(Remember that Republicans in Congress spent four years trying to blame Hillary Clinton for the deaths of four people at the US consulate in Benghazi and they spent two years investigating Clinton’s use of private emails, which succeeded in bringing down her approval ratings, as Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy noted. No charges resulted from either case, but Trump still wants to jail Clinton.)
Trump has offered variations of the false claim that Democrats don’t really care about the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that Trump is terminating to clear the way to deport the children of undocumented immigrants, Fact Checkers Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly wrote in the Post May 1. The president has wrongly asserted 34 times that a border wall was needed to stop the flow of drugs across the southern border, even though the Drug Enforcement Administration says a wall would not stop the illegal trade, as much of it travels through legal border entries or through tunnels that go under existing walls.
While Trump’s defenders say other presidents have lied, too, the New York Times compared Trump’s lies with those of other presidents and reported Dec. 14, 2017, that Trump in the first 10 months of his presidency told 103 separate lies, while Obama told 18 lies during his eight years in office. That works out to about two a year for Obama and about 124 a year for Trump. But it’s worse when you consider that Obama didn’t continue to repeat things that turned out to be untrue, such as his most notorious claim, that all Americans would be able to keep their existing health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. ObamaCare).
“Obama rarely told demonstrable untruths as president,” David Leonhardt, Ian Prasad Philbrick and Stuart A. Thompson noted in the Times. “And he appears to have become more careful over time. We counted six straight-up falsehoods in his first year in office. Across his entire second four-year term, we counted the same number, six, only one of which came in his final year in office.”
However, when Trump is caught lying, the Times reporters noted, “he will often try to discredit people telling the truth, be they judges, scientists, FBI or CIA officials, journalists or members of Congress. Trump is trying to make truth irrelevant. It is extremely damaging to democracy, and it’s not an accident. It’s core to his political strategy.”
As Robert Mueller appears to be winding up his investigation, his attempts to interview Trump apparently have been rebuffed as Trump’s attorneys and other advisers fear Mueller is setting up a “perjury trap.” What they mean is Trump has shown he cannot be expected to keep his facts straight and he will end up lying to Mueller.
Republicans have been unwilling to stand up to the Lying King so far, as they have called off congressional investigations into Trump’s role in the Russian interference in the 2016 election and even threatened to remove FBI and Justice Department officials (who happen to be Republicans) who are supervising the probe. Voters must decide if they will tolerate a Grand Oligarch Party that enables the president’s reckless disregard for the truth and the neutering of the rule of law. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2018
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