The Nation's Pants Are On Fire
Every pending court case against Donald J. Trump has a single theme: his inability to tell the truth. But his falsehoods thrive in an alternative, right-wing universe of lies
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”I hardly need to make the argument that Donald Trump is a liar,” historian and journalist Eric Alterman wrote in Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie—And Why Trump Is Worse (Basic Books: 2020). Alterman notes that although all presidents have and do lie, Trump’s capacities in this department are “both shocking and gruesomely impressive.” Over three days in 2019, Alterman continues, Trump lied outright or issued misleading statements 171 times.
There was worse to come. Alterman’s book came out in September 2020; on November 2, the day before the election, as Trump crisscrossed the country, he unbelted “503 false or misleading claims,” according to Washington Post reporters Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly.
OK, some of them were probably the same lies told multiple times. But Kessler, Rizzo, and Kelly also saw a pattern: the longer Trump was in the presidency, the more he lied. “This astonishing jump in falsehoods is the story of Trump’s tumultuous reign,” they write.
By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency — averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day.
What is especially striking is how the tsunami of untruths kept rising the longer he served as president and became increasingly unmoored from the truth.
Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims [per] day in this third year — and 39 claims a day in his final year. Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and an additional 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later.
Fast forward to spring 2023 and the Manhattan Grand Jury indictment that resulted in Trump’s arrest and arraignment on April 4. You will see 34 felony counts that read precisely the same: falsification of business records in the first degree. Or, as each one reads, “with intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime, and aid and conceal the commission thereof, made and caused a false entry in the records of a business enterprise.” Only the dates are different, and each felony count presumably refers to one of the multiple payments that Trump allegedly made to his fixer, Michael Cohen, for fronting $130,000 in hush money to Stormy Daniels.
This indictment is like a Russian nesting doll of lies.
But there’s more. Just yesterday, Trump sat for a seven-hour deposition with New York State Attorney General Letitia James that was also about—you guessed it!—lying. James is suing Trump, and all of his children, for “numerous acts of fraud and misrepresentations” that, should they lose, will cost them, and the Trump Corporation, $250 million. And here’s the best part: Trump was under oath. Since he cannot stop lying, will there eventually be perjury charges too?
And all the while, a grand jury commissioned by Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis is mulling and pondering an election interference case stemming from the phone call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021, asking Raffensberger to “find” the 11,000 votes he needed to win Georgia’s electoral votes. And we also know that Trump and several dozen allies made numerous phone calls of this kind asking state officials to lie for them.
When you add all these things up, it makes Richard Nixon look like a piker. But of course, what Nixon did not have was Fox News, streaming right-wing bloggers, and a social media environment that pretends to care about facts but then proceeds to undermine them. Take this as an example: because I was curious, I signed up for Twitter’s community notes program, where users evaluate the truth claims of posts, adding links to good sources that support their evaluation.
And yet, in the “For You” section, this same Twitter suggested that I subscribe to One America News’s stream, the same “news” outlet that promoted fraudulent claims about the 2020 election, claims that the Biden administration will force Americans to buy electric vehicles, and recently published an op-ed claiming that federal geofence technology on the southern border and in law enforcement means that “we’re all suspects and databits to be tracked, catalogued and targeted. Forget about being innocent until proven guilty.”
We can use the court system to tackle Trump’s lies, but they are the tip of the iceberg in many ways. We now live in a media ecosystem where lying—for political and economic reasons (yes, just the other day, I heard spokesperson Rudolph Giuliani advising listeners to liquidate their 401(k) accounts and buy gold bars)—saturates the culture.
What will we do about that?
Short takes:
The Spectator’s Andrew Cockburn reports rumors from unnamed sources that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is retiring from the GOP leadership—and the Senate itself. “Senators John Barrasso of Wyoming, John Cornyn of Texas and John Thune of South Dakota are actively reaching out to fellow Republican senators in efforts to prepare for an anticipated leadership vote,” Cockburn writes. In particular, aspirants have targeted “a plethora of conservative senators, including the sixteen who voted to delay the leadership election earlier this year, a proxy for opposition to McConnell’s leadership.” But in today’s GOP—it could be anyone. Ted Cruz, don’t hide your light under a bushel! (April 13, 2023)
There is some evidence that the weedkiller glyphosate, sold as Roundup, may have a role in human cancers. But autism? Nope. Yet Stephanie Seneff, a senior researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory who is not a biologist, has become a star on the alt-science MAGA lecture circuit for insisting that it does. In addition, according to Kiera Butler at Mother Jones, the 74-year-old Seneff also claims “that Americans were getting more serious cases of Covid than their international counterparts because glyphosate exposure weakened the immune system and increased the risk of severe infection.” For years, Butler writes, Seneff’s crackpot theories were confined to the fringes. Still, Covid has put her on a range of far-right shows, including Laura Ingraham’s The Ingraham Angle and a range of conspiracist streaming platforms. Seneff’s rise is also a sign of the rise of conspiracism in the autism community more generally. (April 13, 2023)
Well, as Ronald Reagan used to say, “There you go again!” The Texas Senate culture warriors are still jiggling their worry beads about ideological indoctrination. As Kate McGee writes in the Texas Tribune, “Senate Bill 16 would bar university professors from compelling students `to adopt a belief that any race, sex, or ethnicity or social, political, or religious belief is inherently superior to any other race, sex, ethnicity, or belief.’” McGee points out that it is the vagueness of such legislation that creates a chilling effect since “Legislators preliminarily approved the bill on Tuesday with an amendment that would add a process for students or other members of the public to lodge complaints against a professor they believe is violating the law. Faculty who violate the law could see their tenure revoked or lose their jobs.” (April 11, 2023)
Professors are not in the “belief” business. That’s the track for theologians & fakirs.
And besides, isnt “all people are created equal” shorthand for the “belief that <NO> race, sex, or ethnicity or social, political, or religious belief is inherently superior to any other race, sex, ethnicity, or belief.’
Indeed.