WHEN FIBBING ISA FACT OF LIFE
Deception has long been a hallmark of politics in Washington, but Trump’s dishonesty both terrifies, enthralls the public
When President Donald Trump told donors at a fundraiser this past week that he had invented a fact during a conversation with Canada’s prime minister, the surprise was not that America’s leader makes things up, but that he openly admitted it.
In the furor that followed the disclosure of his remarks, attention focused on the impact on relations with Canada and whether the president was right or wrong in his assertion about trade.
But the episode goes to the heart of a more fundamental debate about Trump: When does he know the things he says are false and when is he simply misinformed?
Trump, after all, has made so many claims that stretch the bounds of accuracy that full-time fact-checkers struggle to keep up. Most Americans long ago concluded that he is dishonest, according to polls.
“His statement this week was another reminder of how cavalier he is with the truth,” said Bill Adair, the founder of PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prizewinning, nonpartisan factchecking website owned by the Poynter Institute. “He seems so willing to say whatever suits him at that moment regardless of whether it’s true. In all the time that I was editor of PolitiFact and in the time since when I’ve worked with fact-checkers all over the world, I’ve just never seen any political figure distort the truth so recklessly.”
Since Trump became a presidential candidate, PolitiFact has evaluated more than 500 assertions and found 69 percent of them mostly false, false or “pants on fire” false. By comparison, it judged 26 percent of the statements by Obama that it evaluated as false and the same percentage for those by Hillary Clinton.
Outlandish claims
Trump’s presidency has been marked from the start with false or misleading statements, such as his outlandish claims that more people came to his inauguration than any before and that at least 3 million unauthorized immigrants voted illegally against him, costing him the popular vote. He has gone on to assert that President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower, a claim that his own Justice Department refuted, and that he would not benefit from his tax-cutting plan.
The lack of fidelity to facts has real-world consequences in both foreign affairs and domestic policymaking. Foreign diplomats and lawmakers of both parties say they do not assume anything he says is necessarily true.
In a White House where one aide described the existence of “alternative facts” and another acknowledged telling “white lies,” staff members scramble to defend his claims without putting their own credibility on the line. News organizations debate when to use the word “lie” because it implies intent.
Trump’s defenders say fact-checking organizations like PolitiFact are politically biased, which Adair and his counterparts adamantly deny.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Friday. Trump’s supporters rarely defend him as a truth teller, but argue that all presidents lie and point to false statements made by his predecessors, like Bill Clinton (Monica Lewinsky), Bush (Iraq) and Obama (health care).
“I think presidents, all of them, actually have a habit of thinking that they’re right, whether they’re right or not,” said Patrick Caddell, a political consultant who shared research with Trump’s 2016 campaign. “He’s more guilty of that than some sort of preplanned and mendacious statements.”
But Caddell — a strategist for Jimmy Carter when he was beaten up by the media as naive for promising never to tell a lie — said Americans see Trump in context. “In Washington, D.C., facts don’t matter; people have narratives, including the media, and they just ignore anything that doesn’t fit that,” he said. “Why should the American people punish him when they think the entire political culture” is that way?
Hyperbole as a tool
As a businessman, Trump often fabricated or exaggerated to sell a narrative or advance his interests. In his memoir, “The Art of the Deal,” he called it “truthful hyperbole” or “innocent exaggeration.”
When trying to lure investors to a hotel project, he had bulldozers dig on one side of the site and dump the dirt on the other to give the impression that the project was making progress. He would call reporters and pretend to be a publicity agent for himself named John Barron or John Miller. He claimed to earn $1 million from a speech when it was $400,000. He claimed to be worth $3.5 billion when seeking a bank loan, four times what the bank eventually found.
“He’s a salesman and that’s not about telling the truth, that’s not the DNA about being a salesman,” said Gwenda Blair, the author of “The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a President,” a biography of his family. “The DNA of being a salesman is telling people what they want to hear. And he’s got it.”
Trump continued his practice as president. The Washington Post’s fact-checker documented 2,140 false or misleading claims in Trump’s first year in office, a rate of nearly six a day.
A Quinnipiac University poll in January showed that only 35 percent of Americans consider him honest, while 60 percent do not.
Republicans as well as Democrats express concern. Amanda Carpenter, a former aide to Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and former Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, has a new book coming out in May called “Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us.” On the cover is an illustration of Trump with a Pinocchio nose.
Her explanation is that Trump’s supporters do not see deception, they see a commitment to winning.
“Donald Trump’s lies and fabrications don’t horrify America,” says the publisher’s summary of her book. “They enthrall us.”