Tag Archives: Trump’s lies

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Lying has become ‘tolerable’ among politicians?

Jimmy Carter once promised that he would never lie to Americans if they elected him president of the United States.

To the best of my knowledge and memory, the 39th president kept that promise. Perhaps he didn’t tell us everything in real time about sensitive negotiations with Egyptian President and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin as they crafted a comprehensive peace treaty. He might have held back on what he told Iranian leaders who held our citizens hostage for 444 days in 1979-80.

I don’t believe he lied.

We fast-forward now to the present day. The current president has demonstrated that he cannot tell the truth.

Donald Trump lies at every level. He lies when he doesn’t need to lie. He lies when it is easier to tell the truth. He lies about matters large and small.

I cannot single out the major lies he has told. They usually involve a political foe. He will say something that puts someone in a negative light. If it’s a lie, well, so be it.

The petty lies are equally remarkable. He lied about his late father being born in Germany; Fred Trump was born in New York City. He lied about losing friends on 9/11; he lost zero friends, he attended zero funerals of those who died on that terrible day.

Trump is lying at an astonishing pace. The Washington Post is keeping a running tabulation the falsehoods; it has passed the 10,000 mark so far and the pace is quickening.

I mention all of this because Donald Trump keeps insisting that he has been “totally exonerated” regarding the Russia matter. No, he hasn’t.

Thus, Trump lies even when the public record demonstrates precisely the opposite to be true. Robert Mueller’s report on his investigation into alleged collusion is clear: The special counsel could not clear Trump of obstruction of justice; nor could he prosecute him. Still, Trump lies when he says he has been “totally exonerated.”

How in the world can we accept a single thing this individual says as truth? My view: We cannot. 

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Yep, Trump’s lying is ‘pathological’

I think it was one or more of his 2016 Republican Party presidential primary foes who called Donald Trump’s penchant for prevarication a “pathological” condition.

That is, he can’t help himself. He has some sort of liar’s disease that guides him toward the telling of outright falsehoods, even when they serve no purpose — at all!

Such as what transpired this week in an Oval Office meeting the Liar in Chief had with the NATO secretary-general.

Trump went on a brief riff about how he gets along so well with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Then he blurted out something about his late father, Fred Trump, being born in Germany.

Hold on! He wasn’t born in Germany! He was born in 1905 — in New York City, New York, U.S.A.!

We all looked it up. It’s right there, all over every Internet platform you can find. Just Google “Fred Trump” and it pops up. Place of birth: New York, New York. 

OK, this is a little thing. It doesn’t matter all by itself. It’s just one of those examples Trump critics keep noticing, that he cannot tell the truth about anything. Not ever!

So it’s fair to wonder: If he’s going to lie about something as inconsequential as that, what other truths is he keeping from the rest of the world?

Hmm, I’m thinking . . . probably a lot!

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Now the lies are getting, um, really strange, man

There can be no doubt about it. The Liar in Chief’s prevarications are getting bizarre in the extreme.

Donald Trump is now boasting about winning a golf tournament at his Mar-a-Lago, Fla., resort. Except that he didn’t play in the tournament!

Golf Magazine reports that a plaque has appeared in the men’s locker room at Mar-a-Lago proclaiming Trump to be the 2018 men’s champion of a tournament that went on without him.

Huh? Eh? What?

Weird, yes? Yes! It is!

Mythical golf championship

Now there’s the Tim Cook fiasco.

The president played host to the CEO of Apple, Inc. at the White House the other day. He mistakenly referred to Tim Cook as Tim Apple. The reporters picked up on it. They reported it. It was recorded on live audio. I’ve heard it. Yep, the president said “Tim Apple.”

Now he says he didn’t say it. But . . . but . . . you did, Mr. President.

Furthermore, Trump said he inserted the word “Cook” quietly between “Tim” and “Apple,” but that the “fake news” reported only the “Tim Apple” reference to, um, embarrass the president.

Mr. President, you already are an embarrassment. You need no assistance from the media to shore up what many millions of us know about you already.

Good grief!

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Trump performance at CPAC is utterly jaw-dropping

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If you have the time — and arguably a stomach strong enough to withstand it — you need to take a couple of hours to watch the video attached to this blog post.

It is Donald John “Stable Genius” Trump’s full speech delivered this past weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

This record-setting tirade is a case study in presidential idiocy. It sets the stage for the kind of campaign we can expect from the 45th president of the United States if he decides to run for re-election in 2020.

I say “if” because I am not yet totally convinced he’s in. Trump probably is going to run. But . . . one never can presume anything as it relates to the president.

But this CPAC soliloquy is utterly jaw-dropping in the nonsense that poured out of POTUS’s mouth. The Washington Post counted more than 100 outright lies that came from Trump in his two-hour tirade.

The histrionics, the hyperbole, the hysteria is utterly, astonishingly, and unbelievably bizarre in the extreme.

I am forced to ask yet again: What in the name of all that is dignified did we get when this individual managed to win enough electoral votes to become the president of the United States of America?

I actually get it. This individual speaks for those who “think” as he does. He echoes their cynicism and calls it “populism.”

Unbelievable!

Donald Trump, national news

Now it’s Jared Kushner in the hot seat . . . sheesh!

Good grief! My head is hurting.

As if the scandals surrounding the president’s possible violation of the Emoluments Clause, the Robert Mueller investigation, the hush money payments to a porn star weren’t enough — now we hear that the First Son-in-Law, Jared Kushner is the midst of yet another potential scandal.

Donald Trump said he didn’t do anything to grease it for Kushner to get a top-secret security clearance to work in the White House. Kushner’s wife, Ivanka Trump, said the same thing.

Then comes reporting that — yep! — the president did, in fact, order that Kushner get the security clearance. The president threw his weight around to assure that Kushner, the guy with zero government experience or exposure, would get the top clearance offered to key White House advisers.

When does this baloney stop? When do we stop being jarred by the president’s astonishing lies?

I think I know when it’ll happen. That will occur when Donald Trump walks out of the White House for the final time.

Oh, how I hope it’s sooner rather than later.

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How do these politicians get away with this?

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Get a load of this picture, taken today at the House Government Oversight Committee grilling of Michael Cohen, the former friend/fixer/lawyer for Donald J. Trump.

Committee Republicans are attacking Cohen as a liar, a convicted liar at that, a guy who’s headed for the slammer in the very near future. They don’t believe him when he says he’s telling ’em the truth about what he knows about Trump.

What astounds me to the max is how these individuals can take themselves seriously, given that their party’s chieftain, the president of the United States, is arguably the most egregious liar ever to take up residence in the White House.

Donald Trump lies to our faces. He lies when he doesn’t have to lie. He says things he must know are false, but he says them anyway.

My amazement stems from Republicans’ inability or unwillingness to recognize what the president has done while seeking the nation’s highest office and while has served in it.

He has lied repeatedly, gratuitously and without regard for the consequences of what his lying has done.

And so now they are attacking Michael Cohen, who has acknowledged his guilt as a convicted felon, an admitted perjurer, as a liar? Give . . . me . . . a . . . break!

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Oh, the irony of the ‘liar defense’

I cannot get past the amazing, astonishing irony of Donald Trump’s political friends as they ratchet up their assault on Michael Cohen, the president’s former friend and personal lawyer and so-called “fixer.”

U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican blowhard, has joined the president in calling Cohen a liar, mounting a defense of Trump on the basis of Cohen’s admitted lying to Congress, the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI and heaven knows who else.

Gaetz also has threatened to expose affairs that Cohen allegedly had with women. Can you say “witness intimidation”?

Cohen is going to testify over the next three days about what he did for Trump, the lies he told on the president’s behalf and about Trump’s personal conduct as a business mogul and as president.

The irony is this: Donald Trump has lied repeatedly since he took office more than two years. At last count, watchdog groups have come up with something close to 9,000 false statements/lies/prevarications.

And now the Liar in Chief’s allies — such as Rep. Gaetz — are hanging the liar label on Michael Cohen?

This is, shall we say . . . oh, so rich!

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He said, he said … to himself

Donald J. Trump is on record telling “Fox & Friends” that he knows Matthew Whitaker, the nation’s newest acting attorney general.

Then the president contradicted himself by telling us he doesn’t know Whitaker. He made the latter statement after appointing him acting AG upon the president’s firing of Jeff Sessions as the nation’s top lawyer.

So, which is it? Does he know Whitaker or doesn’t he?

I’ll take a guess.

Trump knows Whitaker. He knows that the acting AG is no fan of Robert Mueller’s probe into “the Russia thing.”

Thus, the president lied to Americans about not knowing the acting attorney general.

Imagine that.

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Trump is impossible to believe — at any level!

I used to say when Stanley Marsh 3 — Amarillo’s most notable weirdo — was alive that there wasn’t a single thing I could disbelieve about him. He seemed capable of pulling off damn near any stunt imaginable.

That said, there is not a single thing I can believe coming out of Donald J. Trump’s mouth. Nothing he says — not a damn thing — is to be taken at face value.

“Do you love your wife, Mr. President?” He would say “yes,” but do I actually believe him? Not for a second! Or an instant!

Jonathan Karl of ABC News asked the president about his truth-telling. The president said “I do try” to tell the truth, but added that sometimes “I can’t.” He offered some goofy explanation about how things change: “I always want to tell the truth. When I can, I tell the truth. And sometimes it turns out to be to be where something happens that’s different or there’s a change, but I always like to be truthful.”

Is he saying that circumstances change as he’s talking about them? Does he suggest that when he starts providing an answer that matters change that turn a truthful answer into a lie?

How does this guy get away with it?

The liar in chief

Donald Trump has turned lying into something of a political art form. His critics — such as me — no longer believe anything that comes out of his mouth. His supporters — such as some readers of this blog — give him a pass.

These Trumpsters, many of whom I count as friends of mine, demand the truth from people such as me when commenting on the president, but make no such demand of the guy who lies gratuitously, without any discernable need. When given an opportunity to remain silent on an issue, he chooses to lie.

He boasts about the “huge” victory he scored in 2016. He brags about the record size of his inauguration crowd. Trump blasts past president for playing too much golf, says he won’t have time for it, then plays more golf than any of them. He says America is the only nation on Earth that grants citizenship to people born here, but that’s not true, either.

His fans don’t mind the lies.

What in the world … ?

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This is just a little lie, but it’s a lie nonetheless

In the growing list of Donald J. Trump lies and prevarications, this one ranks as a minor-leaguer, not really worth a damn.

However, it illustrates quite graphically how the president’s fast-and-loose treatment of facts keeps rising up to bite him — and the rest of us — in the backside.

Former President Barack Obama delivered a speech today in Illinois that went straight after Donald Trump. The Obama speech marked the 44th president’s return to the political arena.

What, then, was the 45th president’s response to it? He told a crowd in North Dakota that he watched a little bit of the speech, but then “fell asleep.”

There you have it. Trump would have us believe that Barack Obama’s speech bored Trump so much that he couldn’t stay awake.

Do you believe Trump actually nodded off? Nope. Neither do I.

Which brings me to my point. Why in the name of bald-faced lying would Trump feel the need to say such a thing? Why couldn’t he just say that the speech did nothing for him? That he found it boring?

You see, this seems to get right to the point of what so many of us find so damn troubling about Donald Trump. He cannot tell the truth on anything, at any level.

I know that this lie won’t matter in the grand scheme of the chaos that rules the White House. It doesn’t involve public policy decisions. It certainly doesn’t measure up to some of the whoppers he has told: millions of illegal immigrants voting for Hillary Clinton; watching “thousands” of Muslims cheering the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11; having “proof” that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and, thus, was ineligible to run for the presidency.

Big lies. Little lies. I know there’s a difference. No matter the size of the lie, that Donald Trump would tell them is reason enough to be frightened by the president of the United States.