Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire!
… The Guardian has catalogued more than 100 falsehoods made by the Republican nominee over the last 150 days, and sorted them according to theme.
Degrade and Destroy
For decades, Trump has described America and its leaders in apocalyptic terms. He thought Ronald Reagan weak and “a disaster”, he lambasted George HW Bush and Bill Clinton’s policies, and after supporting George W Bush’s Iraq invasion, quickly dismissed that war as “a mess”.
In Trump’s world, crime is always rising (the national rate fell for decades), and African Americans are “living in hell” (they are not). Migrants are flooding in (more Mexicans are leaving than arriving), and they bring violence (there is no evidence that they do). Civilian and military leaders are always clueless (Trump received five deferments from Vietnam), except when they love him. We have no idea who refugees or undocumented migrants are, and they take our jobs (we know very well who they are; they include his wife).
Trump’s vision of the US has been, for decades, one of dystopia – he even described the 1990s as a crisis worse than the Great Depression. But amid all this desolation Trump gains three things. He fuels doubt and fear, leaving people vulnerable; he denigrates his opposition en masse, blaming the world on them; and he raises himself up above the nonexistent wreckage.
Embiggen Big League
Like a man who once took a joke about the size of his hands too hard, Trump spends a lot of time trying to look as large as possible, from his never-proven $10bn worth (Forbes estimates $3.7bn) to crowds at his rallies and his success in meaningless internet polls.
This self-inflation is pierced throughout by paperwork. In March, the Guardian found that Trump valued a New York golf course at $50m in one document and at $1.4m in a court filing (he sued to pay lower taxes). On Thursday, the New York Times reported similarly huge discrepancies in his reported income. The Washington Post has shown repeatedly that Trump’s boasts of charitable giving have virtually nothing behind them.
He has also falsely bragged of endorsements from federal agencies and claimed “many environmental awards”, and tried the ploy in reverse: he has called the millions his father gave him as “a small loan” and portrayed his $916m loss in 1995 as an example of “smart” tax avoidance.
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Shout at the Messenger
Whenever in doubt, Trump attacks what he calls “the dishonest media”, accusing reporters (without evidence) of bias, inaccuracy and a failure to show the size of his rallies. He ignores that reporters quote him extensively, call his campaign for comment, interview his supporters, his rival’s campaign and independent voters and experts. He often cites news stories about Clinton, and even praised fact-checkers in a presidential debate for catching her in a falsehood.
At every rally, Trump says the cameras refuse to show his audience, even though his campaign forces cameras to stay within a small pen, where they pan to show the crowd – as anyone at his rallies or watching online can see. Only one camera at each event stays fixed on Trump: the shared “pool” camera, whose footage networks share and which stays on Trump so as not to miss his speech.
Last week, NBC’s Katy Tur, a target for criticism from the podium, noted that Trump “has joked in private with reporters about how he understands how the pool camera works”.
“This is a shtick that he does to rile up his base,” she said, “to give them an excuse for polls that might not be in his favor, to give them an excuse to berate someone that’s not Donald Trump.”
Trump’s scorched earth insults, like his attacks on other institutions, try to delegitimize authority and leave only himself in its place. But while most Americans still respect other institutions that Trump has demeaned, the press was vulnerable. Decades of cable news punditry had already diminished opinion of the press, and the internet has sapped major newspapers of their powers to compete with openly partisan sites, fake news and social media networks. Trump tried to fill the vacuum.
Conspiracy Smoke, Fire Not Required
Trump’s most famous false conspiracy, about Barack Obama’s birthplace and who started birtherism, is only one of many.
There was Ted Cruz’s father and JFK’s assassin, drawn from a tabloid with ties to Trump; the climate change “hoax” that was “invented by the Chinese”; the Muslims who cheered September 11; the vaccines that cause autism; the Miss Universe “sex tape”; the political correctness of San Bernardino; the secret Muslim president and his secret terror agenda; and the antisemitism-tinged plot of bankers and the media.
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Trump himself seems to get lost in the intrigue, and sometimes slips into a Dadaist jumble of anti-Clinton allusions – Whitewater, cattle futures, Benghazi, uranium, Blumenthal, “bleaching” 33,000 emails – that sound sinister when put together. This is apparently the desired effect: a haze of noxious sentiment, even if no one has found fire for all that smoke.
For more than 20 years, journalists and congressional Republicans have tried. The latter have spent tens of millions of taxpayer dollars investigating the Clintons’ associations and careless email practices but have yet to find criminal conduct.
Arguably Trump’s worst conspiracy is his insistence that voter fraud has “rigged” the election, which merges his fringe claims with his attack on institutions. No evidence supports the claim of widespread fraud and the decentralized electoral college makes such a conspiracy functionally impossible – but the claim gives Trump something to blame failure on besides himself. Like his other conspiracies, it sows doubt and distrust, diminishing the nation so that Trump can portray himself as an authority.
Trump’s favorite escape from this maze is the phrase “there’s something going on”, which lets Trump suggest malevolence, claim ignorance and say nothing of substance at all.
Deny Everything
When cornered by his own quotes or something he doesn’t know, Trump often lies with blunt denials – “wrong!” – or variations of the phrases “that’s very important” or “we’ll look into it”.
He also tries to wriggle out of uncomfortable situations with this tactic, most notably when he claimed ignorance of David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader who has professed approval for his policies, and white supremacists. Trump had disavowed Duke a few days earlier and denounced him in 2000, but in February he refused to condemn like-minded supporters, saying: “I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists.”
On the edge of pointless self-inflation and denial is Trump’s fixation with Vladimir Putin, whom he has claimed to know “very well”, to have spoken with “indirectly and directly”, and to have never met and “know nothing” about. Trump also falsely insists that Putin called him “a genius” (Putin called him “flamboyant”).
Distortions
Not all Trump’s falsehoods are exotic. Like Clinton and many career politicians, he sprinkles misleading statistics into speeches, including on the murder rate, African American unemployment, poverty among Hispanic Americans, the deficit and taxes.
Trump also takes the tactic a step further, condensing whole arguments into outrageous soundbites. This is how a conservative argument about military presence in Iraq transformed into the claim that Obama “founded” Isis and how Clinton’s support for immigration reform became “open borders” (Yuhas 1-5).
In their personalities and their politics, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump might not have much in common, but in the public eye they share one glaring characteristic: A lot of people don’t believe what they say. In a July New York Times/CBS poll, less than one-third of respondents said Clinton is honest and trustworthy. Trump’s scores were about the same.
Trump’s campaign-trail falsehoods are so legion that cataloguing them has become a journalistic pastime. With a cocky disdain for anything as boring as evidence, the presumptive GOP nominee confidently repeats baseless assertions: He purports to have watched American Muslims celebrate the Twin Towers’ fall; he overstates the sizes of the crowds at his rallies, he understates America’s GDP growth rate, and no reputable business publication agrees with his claims of a personal net worth of $10 billion. In March, when three Politico reporters fact-checked Trump’s statements for a week, they found he had uttered “roughly one misstatement every five minutes.” Collectively, his falsehoods won PolitiFact’s 2015 “Lie of the Year” award. Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks has judged Trump “perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes.”
Clinton isn’t an egregious fabricator like Trump, but she’s been dogged her whole career by a sense of inauthenticity—the perception that she’s selling herself as something she isn’t, whether that’s a feminist, a liberal, a moderate or a fighter for the working class. Detractors, especially on the right, have deemed her dishonest about the facts as well. In 1996, New York Times columnist William Safire called her a “congenital liar,” and decried as utterly implausible Clinton’s statements about commodities trading, the firing of White House travel staff and the investigation of Vince Foster’s suicide. Although unfounded, his charges stuck. Feeding the image of a prevaricator, Clinton has also waffled on or modified her policy positions over the years on issues ranging from free trade to gay marriage. And that doesn’t even include the ongoing investigation of the private email server she used during her tenure as secretary of state, and her highly disputed statements about whether and how it conflicted with government rules.
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On the whole, Clinton’s misstatements are those of a typical politician. She has changed her position on a number of issues, and some of these reversals—like her newfound opposition to the Pacific trade deal she championed as secretary of state—rise to the level of flip-flops or, perhaps, insincere electioneering designed to obscure what she really thinks. In defending her use of a private email server, Clinton has clearly stretched the truth, though whether she grasps the fallaciousness of her statements or believes herself to be giving straight answers is impossible to know. Her biggest problem is how she responds to questions about her veracity. She invariably defaults to a lawyerly persona—a guarded, defensive and hedging style that inhibits her from explaining herself in the relaxed, “authentic” manner voters like to see. That hyper-defensiveness, the lack of apparent forthrightness, is what gave rise to charges like Safire’s two decades ago and what perpetuates the impression that she doesn’t level with the public.
Trump is much more shameless as a trafficker in untruth. He seems willing to say whatever he deems necessary to win support at the moment, and he tries to get people to accept his statements through the sheer vehemence of his rhetoric. When he says, falsely, that “there’s no real assimilation” among “second- and third-generation” Muslims in the United States, it clearly doesn’t matter to Trump whether he’s right; what matters is that he wants us to believe he’s right. Many of his misstatements, taken individually, may be fairly innocent or at least commonplace, but the brazenness and frequency of the falsehoods, and their evident expedience, are what set Trump apart. Moreover, his typical response to being called out is to double down on a falsehood—like denying that he backed the 2003 Iraq invasion and the 2011 Libya intervention—or to pretend he never uttered it, showing an egregious unconcern or contempt for truth that taxes even the generous standards of political discourse.
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Telling the truth matters, even in politics. But we should remember that today, as at other points in our past, charges of lying often arise not out of sober concern for the sanctity of our public discourse, but as a way to score quick and wounding points in the partisan joust that is American democracy (Greenberg 1-5).
Everything about “balance” and “objectivity” as news standards rests on a benefit-of-the-doubt assumption about public figures, and about the public audience. For the public figures, the assumption is that they’re at least trying not to lie, and that they’d rather not get caught. For the public audience, the assumption is that they’ll care about an ongoing record of honesty or deception. But those assumptions do not match the reality of Trump.
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Unlike other public figures we’ve encountered, Donald Trump appears not even to register the difference between truth and lies. He lies when it’s not “necessary” or even useful. He lies when disproof is immediately at hand. He shows no flicker in the eye, or “tell” of any kind, when he is caught in a flat-out lie. Richard Nixon looked tense and sweaty when saying “I am not a crook.” Bill Clinton went into his tortured “it depends what the meaning of is is” answer precisely because he was trying to avoid a direct lie.
Trump
doesn’t care. Watching his face for discomfort or “tells” is
like looking at an alligator for signs of remorse.
Thus the media have to start out with the assumption that anything Trump says is at least as likely to be false as true. He has forfeited any right to an “accurate until proven to be inaccurate” presumption of honesty (Fellows 1).
… there’s new evidence [that] backfiring [doubling down on one’s false opinion when confronted with facts] is rarer than originally thought — and that fact-checks can make an impression on even the most ardent of Trump supporters.
But there’s still a big problem: Trump supporters know their candidate lies, but that doesn’t change how they feel about him. Which prompts a scary thought: Is this just a Trump phenomenon? Or can any charismatic politician get away with being called out on lies?
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At least it’s nice to know that facts do make an impression, right? On the other hand, we tend to avoid confronting facts that run hostile to our political allegiances. Getting partisans to confront facts might be easy in the context of an online experiment. It’s much harder to do in the real world (Resnick 2, 4).
Finally, we must not forget the relentless lying foisted upon us by Republican Party officials, operatives, and media mouthpieces during Barack Obama’s eight years as President. Here is a letter that I wrote to the editor of my hometown newspaper after I had heard once too often Mitch McConnell railing about the “Obama economy.”
We have been hearing a lot recently about politicians lying. One lie dwarfs all.
“It’s Obama’s economy,” we hear Republican flaks repeat. “He’s botched it. We will create jobs, grow the economy!” They count on our lack of attention to or memory of important political/economic events of the past decade.
How many of you actually recall the major 2008 GOP-induced economic meltdown and, afterward, how the GOP obstructed the President’s and the Democratic House and Senate’s attempts to stimulate the economy?
During the first two years of Obama’s presidency Mitch McConnell repeatedly used the Senate rule that a minimum of 60 votes were required to defeat the filibuster of any bill brought to the Senate floor for a vote. During most of those two years the Senate consisted of 58 Democrats, 40 Republicans, and two independents. Several of those 58 Democratic senators voted consistently with the Republicans. To reach the 60 vote threshold, Democrats had to gain the support of the two independents (one of them Democrat turncoat Joe Lieberman) and at least two or three “moderate” Republicans. The Affordable Care Act (“Obama Care”), the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the “stimulus package”), and the Wall Street Reform Act (which included the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) managed to slip through after Democrats made bill-weakening concessions. Virtually everything else passed by the Democratic Party-controlled House was successfully filibustered. By the end of 2014, the GOP Senate had used the filibuster rule over 500 times.
Here are a few of the bills – all of which would have benefited working class Americans -- that McConnell’s minions stopped. Infrastructure building; equal pay for women; an increased minimum wage; stoppage of corporate tax breaks for moving jobs and production facilities out of the country; a rehiring of 400,000 teachers, firefighters, paramedics and police officers; student loan reform; an extension of unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed; legislation to help working people join labor unions; the requirement that millionaires pay a comparable tax rate to middle-class Americans, the repeal of Big Oil tax subsidies.
When the Republicans won control of the House in 2010, President Obama’s hopes for improving the lot of ordinary Americans were dashed. Everything the GOP-controlled House thereafter passed was designed either to profit large corporations and the super wealthy or weaken the support system for destitute Americans. Additionally, GOP House and Senate leaders sought to acquire what they wanted by shutting down once and later threatening to shut down the operations of the government.
For seven and a half years the Republican Party has sabotaged the national economy all the while presuming that it could win national elections by pinning the blame for stunted recovery on Congressional Democrats and our President. Liars (Titus 1-2).
Works cited:
Fellows, James, "A More Detailed Guide to Dealing with Trump’s Lies.” The Atlantic, November 28, 2016. Web. https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/11/trump-media/509021/
Greenberg, David, “Are Clinton and Trump the Biggest Liars Ever to Run for President?” Politico, July/August 2016. Web. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/07/2016-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-us-history-presidents-liars-dishonest-fabulists-214024
Resnick, Brian, “Trump Supporters Know Trump Lies. They Just Don’t Care.” Vox, July 10, 2017. Web. https://www.vox.com/2017/7/10/15928438/fact-checks-political-psychology
Titus, Harold. Letter to the Editor of the Siuslaw News, September 10, 2016. Print.
Yuhas, Alan, “How Does Donald Trump Lie? A Fact Checker's Final Guide.” The Guardian. November 7, 2016. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/07/how-does-donald-trump-lie-fact-checker
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