CNN tracked 15 lies of the biggest liar ever to serve as President – guess
who – that excellent article headline:
“The 15 most notable lies of Donald Trump’s presidency (posted January
16, 2021)
Also, related article here from NBC with their headline:
“Trump versus the truth: The most outrageous falsehoods of his
presidency”
And this
added piece from
THE HILL with a grand score of trump’s lies with their headline from
the Washington Post:
“Washington Post counts 30,573 false or
misleading claims in four years by Trump”
Presidential
historian Michael Beschloss said: “I have never seen
a president in American history who has lied so continuously and so
outrageously as Donald Trump, period.”
The full post from the three
above articles:
Washington (CNN) — Trying to
pick the most notable lies from Donald Trump’s presidency is like trying to
pick the most notable pieces of junk from the town dump. His lies that stand out
from his four years in power – for their importance, for their egregiousness,
for their absurdity, or for what they say about the man.
1. It didn’t rain on his inauguration: It rained during Trump’s inaugural address. Then, at a celebratory ball later that day, Trump told the crowd that the rain “just never came” until he finished talking and went inside, at which point “it poured.” This was the first lie of Trump’s presidency. Like his lies that same week about his inauguration crowd, it hinted at what would come next. The President would say things that we could see with our own eyes were not true. And he would often do this brazen lying for no apparent strategic reason.
2. The coronavirus was under control: This was more like a family of lies than a single lie. But each one – the lie that the virus was (1) “equivalent to the flu”; the lie that the situation was “totally under control”; the lie that the virus was “disappearing” – suggested to Americans that they didn’t have to change much about their usual behavior. A year into the crisis, more than 386,000 Americans died from the virus. We can’t say with precision how the crisis would have unfolded differently if Trump had been more truthful. But it’s reasonable to venture that his dishonesty led to a significant number of deaths.
3. Sharpie ID’d when Hurricane Dorian hits Landfall: He tweeted in 2019 that Alabama was one of the states at greater risk from Hurricane Dorian than had been initially forecast. The federal weather office in Birmingham then tweeted that, actually, AL would be unaffected by the storm. Not great, but fixable fast with a simple White House correction. Trump, however, is so congenitally unwilling to admit error that he embarked on an increasingly farcical campaign to prove that his incorrect AL tweet was actually correct, eventually showcasing a hurricane map that was crudely altered with a Sharpie. The slapstick might have been funny had White House officials not leaped into action behind the scenes to try to pressure federal weather experts into saying he was right and they were wrong. The saga proved that Trump was not some lone liar: he was backed by an entire powerful apparatus willing to fight for his fabrications.
4. The Boy Scouts
Congratulated Me: He claimed that “the head of the Boy Scouts” had called
him to say that his bizarrely political address to the Scouts’ National
Jamboree was “the greatest speech that was ever made to them.” One of the
hardest things about fact checking Trump was that a lot of people he lied about
did not think it was in their interest to be quoted publicly contradicting a
vengeful president, but the Scouts confirmed that
no call ever happened.
5. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MI) supports al-Qaeda: At a White House event in 2019, Trump grossly distorted a 2013 quote from Rep. Ilhan Omar to try to get his supporters to believe that the Minnesota Democrat had expressed support for the terrorist group al Qaeda.
He went on to deliver additional bigoted attacks against against Omar in the following months. But it’s
hard to imagine a more vile lie for the President to tell about a Muslim
official – who had already been getting death threats – than a smear that
makes her sound pro-terrorist.
6. The trade deficit with China used to be $500 billion: Trump, an incorrigible exaggerator, rarely chose to use an accurate number when he could instead use an inaccurate bigger number. He said well over 100 times that before his presidency, the U.S for years had a $500 billion annual trade deficit with China – though the actual pre-Trump deficit never even reached $400 billion. Trump made versions of the “$500 billion” claim so many times that it became almost physically painful to fact check it any more.
7. The burly crying
men who had never cried before: They were almost always male. They were
almost always large. They were almost always blue-collar. And, according to the
President, they kept walking up to him crying tears of gratitude – even though
they had almost always not previously cried for years. Trump’s series of Tears Stories – which sometimes doubled
as Sir Stories – helps us see his lying as a kind of
performance art. The stories were oddly grandiose, like something you’d hear
from a two-bit foreign strongman. They were also pure shtick.
8. Trump didn’t know about the payment to Stormy Daniels: Trump is not your traditional political liar. One of his distinguishing features is that he lied pointlessly, dissembling about trivial subjects for trivial reasons. But he also lied when he needed to. Like when he told reporters on Air Force One in 2018 that he did not know about a $130,000 payment to porn performer Stormy Daniels. And, that he did not know where his Attorney Michael Cohen got the money. It all was audacious – Trump knew, because he had personally reimbursed Cohen – and kind of conventional: He was lying to try to get himself out of a tawdry scandal.
9. Trump ended border family separations: Much of Trump’s lying was clumsy, half-baked. Some of it was almost art. Here’s what he told NBC’s Chuck Todd in 2019 about his widely controversial policy of separating migrant parents from their children at the border: “You know, under President Obama you had separation. I was the one that ended it.” He signed a 2018 order to end the family separation. What he did not mention to Chuck Todd is that what he had ended was his own policy – a plan announced by his own AG who had made family separation standard rather than occasional, as it had been under Obama. All of Trump’s words in those two sentences to Todd were accurate in themselves. But he was lying because of what he left out.
10. Biden will
destroy protections for pre-existing conditions: His 2020 re-election
campaign was consistently and consciously dishonest, especially in its attempts to cast Joe Biden as a frightening radical.
When Trump claimed in September that Biden would destroy
protections for people with pre-existing health conditions – though the
Obama-Biden administration created the protections, though the protections were
overwhelmingly popular, though Biden was running on preserving them, and though
Trump himself had tried repeatedly to weaken them – Trump was not merely lying
but turning reality upside down.
11. He got the Veterans Choice Bill into Law: Trump could have told a perfectly good factual story about the Veterans Choice health care program Obama signed into law in 2014: It wasn’t good enough, so he replaced it with a more expansive program he signed into law in 2018. That’s not the story he did tell – whether out of policy ignorance, a desire to erase Obama’s legacy, or simply because he is a liar. Instead, he claimed over and over – more than 160 times – that he is the one who got the Veterans Choice program passed. That he said was after other presidents tried and failed for years. And why not stretch it? He knew he probably wouldn’t be challenged by a press corps drowning in other Trump drama. It wasn’t until August 2020 that he was asked by a reporter about the lie to his face, and he promptly left the room.
12. Windmills cause cancer: It was a problem for the country that Trump was not only a
conspiracy theorist himself but immersed in conspiracy culture, regularly
stumbling upon ludicrous claims and then sharing them as fact. For such a
fierce critic of the media’s use of anonymous sources, Trump sure liked to use
a lot of unnamed sources himself. His stories were full of nonsense he
attributed to “people” or that he claimed “they” say. One of the most bonkers
“they say” items was his 2019 declaration that “they say” the noise
from windmills “causes cancer.” After Trump amplified another conspiracy lie in
2020, NBC’s Savannah
Guthrie admonished him by saying that “You’re not, like, someone’s
crazy uncle who can just retweet whatever.” Except he was, that is until Twitter took down his account.
13. That his
healthcare plan was coming in two weeks: Trump’s big health care plan
was eternally coming in “two weeks.” So were a bunch
of other plans and announcements. Trump is, at his
core, a huckster. Every moment of his presidency was a chance for him to sell
someone on something, whether or not that something actually existed. And if
they asked when they could actually see the magic elixir he said was being
brewed just over there behind the curtain, he would just have to delay them
until they forgot about it.
14. He was once named
Michigan’s Man of the Year: Trump never ever even lived in Michigan. Why
would he have been named Michigan’s Man of the Year years before his
presidency? Simple: He wouldn’t have been. He wasn’t. And yet this lie he
appeared to have invented in the final week of his 2016 campaign became
a staple of his 2020 campaign, repeated at Michigan rally after rally.
It’s so illustrative because it makes so little sense.
15. Trump won the 2020
election: Trump’s long White House campaign against verifiable reality has
culminated with his lie that
he is the true winner of the 2020 presidential election he clearly, certifiably
and fairly lost. To so many people it’s ludicrous nonsense, but to Americans
who support him – MAGA sycophants – it’s the truth, and that got people killed on
January 6. The nation’s truth problem, clearly, isn’t just a Trump problem. It
remains his deception and that event shows how detached from reality he and
MAGA are.
My 2 Cents: I enjoyed the research into this topic of Trump’s lies. It comes today (March 4) just as the 9-0 SCOTUS decision says he
can stay on ballot as they tossed the 14th Amendment challenge to
keep him off.
Now the nation awaits the
biggest decision ever: Whether the high court will approve his demand for them
to grant him absolute immunity for the crimes pending against him.
I want to ask people who
still cling by him (his MAGA cult members): After all of that news and his over
30,000 documented lies, deceit, and utter BS how can you vote for him and
especially with the promises he has made about “Project
2025” if he wins in November.
Do we truly want the path
that Trump advocates: He as a one-man ruler taking over all branches of
government and running his way and no other way? Boy, I hope not, but I also
have some fear about people around him and who support him that do not
comprehend what that would mean – that is: The U.S. under Trump’s total control
and the only rules or laws that applied to anyone about anything would be what
he says and wants – that is what he has said he will do if reelected and that
part believe he will try to do.
To me it’s utterly mind-boggling how
anyone can stick with Trump. Let’s hope they do not – he does not deserve to be
anywhere near the Oval Office never again, period.
Thanks for stopping by.
No comments:
Post a Comment