Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Trump a liar? Not when it comes to campaign promises
DONALD Trump just may be our most honest president since Abraham Lincoln. Sure, The Washington Post’s valiant if pedantic fact-checkers claim that in “710 days, President Trump has made 7,645 false or misleading claims.” The Post’s Glenn Kessler even introduced a new rating for the Trump era, the “bottomless Pinocchio,” for a false claim repeated over and over again.
The competing fact-checkers over Trump said, “We’re going to lower taxes on American business from 35 percent to 15 percent.” He did win a reduction of the corporate tax rate to 21 percent.
Trump promised during the presidential campaign to nominate a about a politician keeping his word to this degree. It’s also exceedingly rare, especially recently.
George H.W. Bush ran on a “read my lips” pledge against tax increases. He turned around and broke it. Bill Clinton campaigned in 1992 promising a middle-class tax cut. Once in office, in 1993, he signed into law a tax increase. George W. Bush ran promising a “humble” foreign policy, but he cast that approach aside after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Bush also failed to deliver on the Social Security reform he campaigned on, though it wasn’t for lack of trying.
Our greatest presidents have reputations for integrity that have endured to this day, from the cherry tree myth about George Washington (“I cannot tell a lie”) to the stories about “Honest Abe” Lincoln. It’s certainly not yet clear that Trump is in Washington or Lincoln’s class. Few presidents are. Though Trump does seems to be trying, he’ll eventually be judged more on results than on effort. No new physical border barrier has been fully built. American troops have not ended their deployments overseas.
One needn’t be an advocate of the border wall or an opponent of the Syria deployment or even a fan of Trump to appreciate that it’s actually good for democracy when politicians, after elections, try to keep the promises they made during campaigns. When such promises are quickly or easily abandoned, it risks breeding voter cynicism, disillusionment and disengagement. Why even bother listening to political rhetoric if what the candidates say bears no resemblance to what they eventually do?
If Trump, in at least this particular way, is not corrupt, it’s a kind of honesty that’s important — maybe even more important than some of the misstatements for which he has been faulted. Call him the promise-keeper president.