White House communications officials — to a person — have the toughest jobs in America. Of that I am now convinced.
They have to respond to mistruths — yes, outright lies — muttered by the man for whom they all work.
Donald J. Trump, the president of the United States, provides an endless supply of them. It’s stunning.
Two of them poured out of his pie hole just this week. The White House communications team had to acknowledge that, yep, they were false.
Trump appeared before the Boy Scout Jamboree and delivered a patently hideous speech that injected partisan politics into a patently non-political event. He said Scout leaders called him to tell him that was the greatest speech ever delivered to the Jamboree.
They never called. Indeed, the head of Boy Scouts of America issued an apology for the tone and tenor of the president’s speech.
Then came the statement, again from Trump, that Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto phoned him to congratulate Trump on cracking down on illegal immigration into the United States from Mexico.
Uhhh, that call never was made, either.
This is part and parcel of the president’s modus operandi: tell a lie and then never, ever atone for it by acknowledging — at minimum — that he might have “misspoken.”
I get that Trump is far from the first politician to fudge the truth. Then-Sen. Barack Obama once made a mention while he was running for president of “all 57 states” in this country. Oops! He missed that one by seven. Do you also remember how Hillary Clinton once told of dodging hostile gunfire while landing in Bosnia? That was a more egregious error.
The current president, though, is making a mockery of the truth. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has accused the Trump administration of launching an “assault on the truth” as it seeks to bob-and-weave its way through the Russia investigation.
The assault is being coordinated — and I use that term with caution — by the man at the top. He cannot help himself. He cannot tell the truth.
How in the name of efficacy does he get away with this?