If his lips move, he’s lying.
The New York Times fact-checked Trump’s 63-minute ramblings during a recent campaign stop in Las Vegas found 64 false, inaccurate or misleading comments – one per minute. That deceit wasn’t even a record. A contender for this award would be Trump’s 64-minute press conference in August at Mar-a-Lago, which was more monologue than question-and-answer: He collected at least 162 lies, misstatements and vast exaggerations from NPR’s count – about 2.5 per minute.
And of course there is the final count about his presidency from the Washington Post Fact Checker, distributor of those disgraceful Pinocchios: a total of 30,573 lies and misleading statements and tweets. That’s almost 20 a day, starting on Day 1 with Trump’s lies about the size of his inauguration crowd and the weather — denying that it was raining when former President George W. Bush meme-worthy battle with a poncho clearly proved the opposite – and, in his inaugural speech, about the supposed “massacre” he had inherited. (“That was some weird s—,” Bush mumbled when he left.)
Trump has since lied most ominously still he denied his 2020 defeat at virtually every rally. The dishonesty has increased as he runs for re-election. Pathological lying should be a disqualification for office, but for nearly half the electorate that is not the case. To be sure, obscuring the truth is a feature of politics, not a bug. But being on Trump’s scales is a bug, and a poisonous one.
The lies are bad enough, but that’s it Why he lies in a way that is even more disqualifying: to divide us between “patriots” who support him and those who are un-American because they don’t. Are What he lies about issues that should unite Americans, such as disaster relief, the US position in the world in times of crisis, the integrity of our elections, and the facts about the unprecedented insurrection on January 6. How he gets away with it: by discrediting the free press and tapping into propaganda channels from the right.
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Consider Trump’s response to the devastation wrought across the South by Hurricane Helene, the worst since Katrina two decades ago. At the time, Bush was criticized for the actual incompetence of Washington’s disaster response. even by many Republicans. But Trump is attacking rival Kamala Harris and President Biden for their administration’s response to Helene, based on fabrications.
Once Trump landed in stricken Valdosta, Georgia, on Monday, he charged that the federal government was MIA and that Georgia’s Republican governor was “having a hard time” even getting Biden on the phone. Caught! Gov. Brian Kemp himself had previously told reporters that Biden had called him the previous day to make sure Kemp had everything he needed and to urge him to call directly for something else. The Republican governors of South Carolina and Virginia also praised the federal response.
At the Valdosta stop, Trump boasted that he got his friend Elon Musk to send Starlink satellites to North Carolina. The Federal Emergency Management Agency had already done that delivered 40 Starlinks to the state to restore communications. On Sunday, Trump opened one meeting in Erie, Pennsylvania.by first insisting he won the battleground state in 2020 (“Bad things happened”) and then lying that while emergency workers searched for bodies in devastated cities, Biden was “sleeping in Delaware in one of his many estates” and “Lyin’ Kamala’ was fundraising. (As usual, he mispronounced her name.)
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This from the man who, as president, withheld money in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico for years and on a late visit paper towels thrown away to residents in need. Who repeatedly threatened to block money from blue state governors, most notably California’s Gavin Newsom during the 2018 wildfires, while promising “A-plus” treatment for states whose governors supported him. Last month he did repeated that threat against ‘Newscum’.
In his nearly two-hour speech in Erie, Trump elaborated on his fear-mongering falsification from last weekend social media to inform about recently released data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Harris, he said, “let in 13,099 convicted murderers,” and thousands more migrants convicted of rape and sexual assault. ‘SHE HAS BLOOD ON HER HANDS!’ he posted on Friday. “Thugs and slimeballs” were “completely unchecked and uncontrolled,” he wrote on Saturday
In factThe ICE data covered migrants who entered for more than four decades — including during Trump’s term — and most are in local, state or federal custody or have completed their sentences. They are all being tracked by ICE, whether they are in jail or not.
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Trump lied in Pennsylvania that he had had to shorten a rally the day before in Wisconsin from a fictional 50,000 attendees to 1,000 because the Biden administration “wouldn’t let” the Secret Service know they had enough personnel to protect him. He repeated his oft-debunked falsehood that “Crazy Nancy Pelosi” had rejected his offer for 10,000 National Guard troops on January 6 and that she had taken responsibility for the violence. “And then they try to blame me for it!” he wailed. In realityincluding Trump’s own Pentagon chief, said under oath that Trump issued no such orders, even during the three hours the then-commander-in-chief watched the chaos on TV.
As his White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, told the nation from the Democratic National Convention in August: “He always told me, ‘It doesn’t matter what you say, Stephanie – say it enough and people will believe you .’ But it does matter: what you say matters, and what you don’t say matters.
Words matter. Lies are really important. And an inveterate liar shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office.
@jackiekcalmes
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
