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American history is replete with instances when the president lied to the American people.

Sometimes it was justified on national security grounds, or that a certain revelation might harm the nation. In other instances, it was deemed that releasing classified information would be embarrassing to the president or the White House. That justification is blurry at best, since denying the public information about the workings of their government is antithetical to the notion of democratic governance.

FDR is the gold standard for leveling with the public as the nation faced the Great Depression. His fireside chats did not minimize the hardships caused by widespread economic collapse, but he rallied the nation to meet the challenges. “The only thing we have to fear is… fear itself.”

Along the way FDR sometimes overreached, he made mistakes. But each initiative was an attempt to move the nation back toward fiscal soundness by enlisting public support for his policies.

In contrast, Lyndon Johnson used the Gulf of Tonkin resolution to wage unlimited warfare in Viet Nam. Johnson went to war without clearly defining a strategy for winning the war (relying on the Viet Cong “body count” isn’t a strategy or proof of winning), or defining a successful end to the conflict. The erosion of public support, Johnson’s stubborn refusal to “lose” the war fueled the tumult of the late sixties.

Nixon tried similar deception, but added new wrinkle; bombing Cambodia in secret. Like Johnson, he didn’t level with the American public. And subsequently 20,000 more American soldiers died because of Nixon’s hubris. Note: This was the moment the military brass discovered that in guerrilla warfare you can’t carpet bomb your way to victory?

George H. W. Bush had a clearly defined objective, remove Saddam’s forces from Kuwait, backed by coalition of civilized nations. Like FDR, Bush marshaled public support for his policy.

His son, George W. Bush pledged to punish the perpetrators of 911. But, when Donald Rumsfeld pointed out that Iraq had more suitable targets than Iran, and major American oil producers could profit from Saddam’s removal, the result was the biggest bait and switch in the history of American politics. Iraqis weren’t alone, the American public was “shocked and awed” by the duplicity of the Bush administration in rallying public support with “cooked” intelligence, courtesy of Dick Cheney’s secret intelligence operation and his constant lying about Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction (WMD’S) .

Condoleezza Rice briefly resurfaced in support of Trump at the 2020 RNC convention, but apparently no one thought to ask her if she had learned anything new about aluminum tubes since her 911 congressional testimony; in which she knowingly made a false claim that Saddam was trying to obtain high-strength aluminum tubes to rebuild his nuclear weapons program, (Rice’s staff was briefed by nuclear experts that “aluminum tubes sought by Saddam were almost certainly not for use in developing a nuclear program,” but that didn’t fit the Bush narrative.)

A kind of “group think” on steroids came over the country, because just about every body got on the “punish Saddam for causing 911” bandwagon, especially in the media, and dissenting voices like Phil Donahue were quashed.

Bush W. bolstered Hitler’s claim in Mein Kampf that the public will more readily fall victim to the big lie than the small lie.

Which naturally brings us to Donald J. Trump, liar extraordinaire.

Here’s a sample of Trump’s lies as the nation hurled toward a health and economic crisis of his own making.

The coronavirus would weaken “when we get into April, in the warmer weather— that has a very negative effect on that, and that type of a virus.” “It’s going to disappear.