Tag Archives: Trump lies

national news

Donald J. Trump: political trailblazer

Donald John Trump is blazing a trail as president of the United States that well might establish a new benchmark that grabs the attention of future presidents.

The Washington Post has been keeping tabs on the number of lies that Trump has told since he took office in January 2017.

Trump has passed the 9,000 mark in the number of false or “misleading” statements, according to the Post. What’s more, he is on pace already to exceed the lying rate he set in the first two years of his presidency, the Post reports.

The Post reports: “The President averaged nearly 5.9 false or misleading claims a day in his first year in office. He hit nearly 16.5 a day in his second year. So far in 2019, he’s averaging nearly 22 claims a day.”

Hey, man! That is awesome.

Trump brags about his big numbers: biggest crowd in history at his inaugural; biggest tax cut in history, he’s done more in his first two years than any president in U.S. history; more jobs created than ever.

Now, though, Trump has provided demonstrable evidence that his lying numbers are No. 1 in the history of the high office he holds.

Nice going, Mr. President.

military news

If only Trump were ‘good’ at lying; he isn’t

Donald Trump is setting some sort of unofficial record for lying, prevarication, misstatements muttered, uttered and sputtered from the White House.

One of his more recent, um, lies takes the cake.

The commander in chief stood before troops in Iraq the day after Christmas. He went to the war zone with his wife, Melania, and told the men and women assembled before him that they had just gotten the first pay raise in 10 years. Lie!

Then he said he fought for a 10-percent pay increase, even though others wanted to grant them a considerably smaller pay raise. Lie!

Our fighting personnel have gotten raises every year for more than three decades. As for the 10-percent raise this year, it didn’t happen. Their raise is considerably smaller than what the president described to them.

Here is what troubles me greatly: Donald Trump’s incessant barrage of falsehoods seems pointless, needless, foundationless. It is gratuitous. He lies when he doesn’t need to lie.

The Washington Post has been keeping track of the president’s lying/prevarication/misspeaking. The newspaper’s total now is past 7,500 such statements — and this is before the end of the first half of the president’s term! His lying is accelerating as well!

I should be more circumspect in calling these statements outright “lies.” To lie is to say something knowing it is false. Some critics have suggested that Trump simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about; therefore, he doesn’t necessarily purposely lie to our faces.

However, Donald Trump has told us repeatedly that he possesses a level of intelligence that few men have ever had. He knows the “best words.” He went to the “best schools.” He got the “best education.” He surrounds himself with the “best people.” Doesn’t all of that suggest to you — as it does to me — that the president should know of which he speaks when he opens his mouth?

The president is a liar. Now he’s gone before the men and women he purports to “love” and revere — our warriors in harm’s way — and lied to their faces!

Amazing.

national news

‘When I can, I tell the truth’

Wow! I’m just now catching my breath.

The quote in the headline comes from the liar in chief, the president of the United States, Donald John Trump Sr.

He said it to ABC News chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl, who scored an interview with the president after a campaign rally this week.

Karl asked the president about the veracity of his statements. He said, “Well, I try. I do try. I always want to tell the truth.” Man, that is astonishing in the extreme.

When someone says they “try” to do something, I have found it is code for admitting they fail to do something. “I am trying to lose weight.” “I am trying to quit smoking.” My favorite is when you invite someone to an event and they respond, “I’ll try,” which always means “I can’t make it.”

I understand full well that presidents on occasion have to shade the truth for, say, national security purposes. They cannot reveal all that they know for obvious reasons. Trump’s lying is vastly different from that type of fibbing.

Donald Trump’s “trying” to tell the truth doesn’t account for the gratuitous nature of his lies. He said he tells the truth “when I can.” Baloney! That doesn’t explain the countless whoppers he has told: witnessing “thousands of Muslims” cheering the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11; the United States is “the only country” that grants birthright citizenship; he has “proof” that Barack Obama was born abroad and was unqualified to run for president.

Hey, I’ve only peeled the top layer off the thousands of lies Donald Trump has told.

More lies than we can count

The Washington Post Fact Checker has detected more than 5,000 lies in the 600 or so days since Trump became president. It adds that the pace is quickening.

Just as George Washington reportedly said “I cannot tell a lie,” Donald Trump cannot tell the truth.

That is no lie.

national news, political news

Lame ducks find their voices

Bob Corker’s lame duck status has enabled him to find the guts to say what he ought to have said all along.

The Tennessee Republican is leaving the U.S. Senate at the end of the year. He hadn’t been overly candid about Donald J. Trump until just before he announced his decision to call it a career.

Now, though, he’s talking about what he perceives to be a “cult” developing with his political party. The cult is devoted blindly, according to Corker, to the president who has seized the party by the throat, has throttled it and has bullied intraparty foes incessantly.

Corker isn’t alone among Republicans who have discovered their courage in the waning months of their political career. He joins Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, who has finally — finally! — called out the president by name for the manner he has chosen to govern the nation.

I fear that Corker’s cult description is far more accurate than even he would prefer. Cult leaders traditionally imbue their “followers” with fear over political retribution if they cross the man/woman at the top of the pecking order.

That just might explain the Republican reluctance to challenge the continual stream of lies and assorted nonsense that fly out of Trump’s mouth. Indeed, the president’s lying mouth has kicked into overdrive since his summit with Kim Jong Un, the North Korean despot who gave up virtually nothing but got a ton of concessions from the president who proclaims himself to be a “great negotiator.”

Why don’t they call the president out for his effusive praise of Kim, the tyrant who murders his foes, his family members, starves his fellow Koreans and threatens the world with nuclear annihilation? He has broken previous promises and kept his people in the dark — quite literally — while he lives in relative opulence.

Is it that cult thing to which Sen. Corker has referred? If only more members of his party would speak as candidly and honestly about what is happening within the halls of power.

International news, military news

Trump tosses truth into the crapper

Donald John “Liar in Chief” Trump’s disdain for the truth has taken an amazing new turn — if that is possible.

He came out of his summit with North Korean dictator/despot Kim Jong Un and declared how “thousands” of parents of missing Korean War veterans begged him to get their remains returned to the United States for proper burial.

The president then said it again today in an extraordinary — and bizarre — media “availability” at the White House.

Let’s back it up a bit, shall we?

The Korean War ceasefire took effect in 1953. That was 65 years ago. A warrior who was lost at the very end of the Korean War might be, oh, 83 to 85 years of age today, if not older. His parents? Let’s see, they would be at minimum 100 years of age, presuming Mom gave birth to her son when she was around 18 years old.

The likelihood is that these parents of missing Korean War vets who begged Donald Trump to do something about their sons’  remains would be much older. Maybe about 120 years of age.

Thus, for the president to say that “thousands” of these parents came to the presidential candidate — who then became president — to seek the return of their remains is an … outright, bald-faced lie.

He is lying in a manner few of us have ever seen in a public official, let alone in the president of the United States.

I gave up a while ago griping about Donald Trump’s penchant for tweeting policy statements. I cannot let pass this individual’s continuing to lie directly to the people he was elected to serve.

national news

So many lies, only one winner?

Politifact has announced perhaps my favorite award category of all time: Lie of the Year.

It’s a fact-checking website that has declared its 2017 Lie of the Year to be Donald J. Trump’s assertion that Russian interference in our electoral process is a made-up story that Democrats fabricated as an excuse for why Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election.

I have to admit that’s a good one.

The president has disparaged the nation’s intelligence-gathering network and has stood behind Russian strongman Vladimir Putin’s “denial” that the Russians hacked into our electoral system.

In fact, there have been so many lies it’s hard to pick just one.

Barack Obama ordered the wiretap of Trump’s campaign office? That’s a good one, too. Millions of illegal immigrants voted for Hillary in 2016, giving her a 3 million popular vote victory? That’s a serious knee-slapper. The president’s electoral victory was the greatest since President Reagan’s re-election in 1984? I can’t stop laughing at that one.

Actually, though, I think Politifact has chosen well. The “Russia thing” hoax lie is really rich, man.

Trump likely would be in the running for lying every year he’s been in politics. My favorite 2016 lie is how he would “stop tweeting” once he became president. And the 2015 winner would have to be that Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns was because of an on-going Internal Revenue Service “audit.”

Come to think of it, has the IRS completed that audit? Was there ever an IRS audit?

Liar, liar …

national news, political news

There are liars, and then there’s Trump

We’ve all heard it said. Perhaps we’ve said it ourselves.

All politicians are liars. How do you know when a pol is lying? When his lips are moving. Yuk, yuk, yuk.

Well, thanks to the New York Times, we have an interesting catalogue of the lies Donald J. Trump has told since being inaugurated president of the United States.

Take time to read it here.

I shudder to think how long the list will be at the end of the president’s current term in office. As it is, just 154 days into his presidency, Trump has compiled an impressive list of prevarications.

As David Leonardt and Stuart Thompson note in their op-ed essay:

“President Trump’s political rise was built on a lie (about Barack Obama’s birthplace). His lack of truthfulness has also become central to the Russia investigation, with James Comey, the former director of the F.B.I., testifying under oath about Trump’s ‘lies, plain and simple.’

“There is simply no precedent for an American president to spend so much time telling untruths. Every president has shaded the truth or told occasional whoppers. No other president — of either party — has behaved as Trump is behaving. He is trying to create an atmosphere in which reality is irrelevant.”

The most astonishing aspect of this, to my way of thinking, is how Trump’s core supporters continue to accept his lying as being OK.

Hey, they insist, the president is “telling it like it is.”

International news

Trump tells another whopper — about Sweden!

It appears that every public appearance by Donald J. Trump produces a signature line, one that provokes astonishment and disbelief.

The other day he held that wild-and-woolly press conference in which he declared he scored the greatest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan. It was false.

Then he jetted off to Melbourne, Fla., for a campaign-style rally. He baited his worshipers with more promises to end “radical Islamic terrorism.” Then he singled out Sweden — Sweden! — as a place that had been victimized by terrorists.

“You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden — Sweden, who would believe this?” Trump bellowed during his rally.

The remark provoked astonished expressions from the Swedes. What? Huh? Terrorist attack? Where? By whom?

Of course, there was no such terror attack in Sweden. Trump made it up. He improvised yet another riff that produced — once again — the kind of thoughtless, careless and reckless rhetoric from the commander in chief.

Each time he does this, the president undermines the nation’s standing, let alone the standing of the high and (formerly) dignified office he occupies.

And what about our relationship with Sweden, a nation that has been famously neutral in world conflicts, but which remains an important ally of ours? Do the Swedes trust the U.S. president? Can they trust him to speak with clarity and precision?

For that matter, can we Americans trust the president?