Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Book by fact-checkers is exercise in civic awareness
President Donald Trump, who constantly and falsely claims superlative achievements in every field of human endeavor, has every right to one historical claim: He is the king of lies. Trump’s presidency has offered up an endless Las Vegas buffet of completely shameless, sometimes laughable, often malicious, always self-serving falsehoods.
Among the most relentless chroniclers of this record have been The Washington Post’s Fact Checker staff: Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo, Meg Kelly and Sarah Cahlan. Their use of a Pinocchio scale to rate the truthfulness of political statements has become a Washington tradition. Its application is meticulously bipartisan. But for the past five or so years,
Trump has been the predominant source of content. Now the president’s prodigious Pinocchios have been gathered into a thick volume, “Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth.”
The authors present not just a paper trail but an avalanche of confirmation for their thesis. They recount Trump’s deceptions about his academic career, his business accomplishments, his enemies, his achievements, his sex and corruption scandals. There are lies that might amuse you (like his false claim to be a Swede), or appall you (like his revision of a National Weather Service map to justify a false claim), or anger you (like his slanders against Sen. John McCain, RAriz., former FBI director James B. Comey and former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III), or frighten you (like his invented claims of electoral fraud).
There is a kind of truth shading that normally attends politics. And when a public official intends to deceive, journalists sometimes debate whether to term this a “lie,” or whether to call its author a “liar.” We are far past this point with Trump.
This is not a case of omitting inconvenient truths. It is deception as a lifestyle choice. It is compulsive violation of the Ninth Commandment. The president is a bold, intentional liar, by any moral definition. A habitual liar. A blatant liar. An instinctual liar. A reckless liar. An ignorant liar. A pathological liar. A hopeless liar. A gratuitous liar. A malevolent liar.
Trump fans may support him despite his lies. They may support him because he lies. But they cannot deny that he is a liar.
The systematic presentation of the president’s deceptions serves an important public purpose. With Trump, these are not regrettable exceptions. The lies are the shape of the man. Their composite reveals a type of truth about his goals and character.
Why does lying really matter? There are, of course, compelling moral reasons. Lies exploit and abuse the trust of those around us. They sever relationships. They poison love.
But there are also practical and compelling civic reasons why truth makes a difference. As the pandemic has shown, we need reliable information to make rational, healthy choices. Deceptive optimism, distrust of experts and the circulation of myths have a human cost — measured in lost lives and delayed national recovery.
More broadly, Trump engages in a particularly ambitious form of political deception. With the help of a compliant right-wing media, he uses repeated falsehoods and conspiracy thinking to create an alternative mental universe for his strongest supporters to dwell in.
Trump’s lies are especially destructive because they are often designed to encourage dehumanization. Immigrants and outsiders are frequent targets. When he falsely charges some American Muslims with celebrating after the attacks of 9/11, or falsely accuses Mexican migrants of a disposition toward rape and violence, Trump is harnessing falsehood in the cause of bigotry.
Reading “Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth” is an exercise in civic awareness. This is what happens when a great many Americans ignore character and dismiss deception. We can’t expect our leaders to be perfect men and women. But we have every right and reason to demand that they are honest and decent. Fortunately an election result, like a lie, can be corrected.