Tag Archives: Trump lies

medical news, national news

Donald Trump: Are his survival ‘skills’ running out?

Donald John Trump has lied his way through three-plus years of the presidency of the United States.

He has lied about the economic revival and the credit he hogs all for himself. Trump has lied about his business acumen and the manner in which he “built” a fortune. Trump has lied about his intention to forgo golf while running up the largest golfing tab in presidential history. Trump lied about the ease with which it would be to erase the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something better.

He lies when he doesn’t need to lie. He cannot tell the truth. He lies about big matters and small matters.

Yet his base sticks with him. They cling to this man’s idiocy.

Now he is lying about the administration’s response to the coronavirus outbreak that threatens to become a pandemic. The latest set of lies, of course, now brings serious consequences. He endangers Americans by telling them the threat is overblown; he advises Americans that it’s OK to go to work even when they’re infected with a “slight” case of the virus.

Has this nitwit’s luck run out? Is the president now facing a situation that brings life and death consequences as a result of his incessant lying?

If a presidential administration needs anything at all at times like this, it needs to be seen as credible. It needs to be taken seriously. The president needs to be seen as a calming, steady and truthful presence on the national scene.

Donald Trump and his administration are none of the above. This medical emergency has brought out the worst in the president. It has revealed for all of us to see in plain sight that we cannot trust a single word that comes from this man’s mouth.

He is a dangerous man who remains fundamentally unfit for the office to which he was elected.

national news

Trump’s penchant for lying goes on and on and on …

Donald Trump declared he was “too busy” to watch the televised impeachment inquiry hearings in the House of Representatives.

“Too busy ” doing what remains a mystery to many of us, but that’s what he said.

What, then, did the president do on Friday during the second day of hearings? He fired off a Twitter message that former Ukraine envoy Marie Yovanovitch said would “intimidate” future witnesses. Indeed, the president commented in real time on what the ex-U.S. ambassador to Ukraine was telling members of the House Intelligence Committee.

Therefore, the president was watching the hearings. He wasn’t “too busy” tending to statecraft.

Why does the Prevaricator in Chief continue to lie?

I have referred to his “gratuitous” lying. He lies when he doesn’t need to lie. He lies for the sake of saying the first thing that enters his skull and flies out of his mouth. Why would he tell the nation he would be “too busy” to watch the hearings when he was watching them?

I don’t get this guy. I don’t understand what rattles around inside his noggin that compels him to lie. What’s more, he’s proven to be a bad liar. He’s not good at it. He says things that are demonstrably fictitious.

Case in point: He has told the nation that he lost “many friends” on 9/11 inside the Twin Towers as they collapsed. He did not. It has been shown that he didn’t attend a single funeral for anyone who died on that terrible day. Yet he lies about losing friends?

To my way of thinking, that fits the description of a “gratuitous lie.” It is something he says because, well, he can.

Donald Trump is never “too busy” to tear himself away from a TV set whenever he is the subject of whatever is being broadcast.

national news

Trump cannot be believed about anything!

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This likely goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway.

Donald Trump is so manifestly untrustworthy that I no longer can believe a single word that flies out of his mouth.

Every declaration this man has made since becoming a politician in June 2015 has been fraught with falsehood. I don’t know why or how it is that it took me so long to make my own non-belief declaration about the president of the United States.

I guess I’m just a bit slow on the uptake.

I’ve been saying since the moment he rode down that Trump Tower escalator to declare his presidential candidacy that Trump is unfit for the office. I based my belief in his  unfitness on a number of issues relating to his personal history, his lack of understanding of government, his behavior.

I didn’t factor in his obsession with lying.

Everything he says needs to be fact-checked. All of Trump’s proclamations need to be run through screeners. Not a single statement that comes from the POTUS can be believed.

Nothing! Zero. It’s all phony. It’s all, shall we say, “fake news.”

Here’s the rich part: The president continues to blast the media for reporting “fake news.” Do the media get everything right every single time? No. Of course not. However, the media do manage to retract stories, offer clarifications, or corrections, or make expressions of “regret” for misreporting events and statements that public figures make.

Trump, though, cannot own any single falsehood. He cannot acknowledge his lying. He must make matters worse by lying about his lies.

I am done believing a single thing Donald Trump says.

national news

Trump’s lies, uh, trump Biden’s mistakes

Donald Trump is trying to make some hay over Joe Biden’s misstatements.

He said “Sleepy Joe” is not up to the job of president of the United States. The president’s surrogates, such as his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, question Biden’s “acuity.” Trump is trying as well to turn the Democratic Party primary frontrunner into an incompetent candidate for the nation’s highest office.

May I weigh in here? No need to answer that. This is my blog and I’ll weigh in anyhow.

Donald Trump’s incessant, relentless lies suggest to me a sociopathic tendency. He lies without any care for the consequence. Sociopathic behavior, to my understanding, suggests a form of amorality … which defines Donald Trump to the letter.

I am inclined to wish that the former vice president gets himself into full campaign shape soon. He’s not there yet. The mistakes, the gaffes and the stumble-bum speechmaking open Biden up to the kind of criticism that Trump and his allies will hurl at him. What’s more, it will stick with that base of voters on whom Trump is depending.

I want to look past all this immediate stuff. I want to examine the Democratic front runner’s lengthy public service career. Has it been hiccup-free? Of course. I concede the point about the plagiarism accusation that dogged him during a 1988 presidential campaign. He tried again in 2008, only to lose the Democratic nomination to Sen. Barack Obama, who then selected him to serve as vice president.

He served for 36 years in the Senate. He chaired the Judiciary and Foreign Relations committees. He built a mountain of credibility and has forged alliances and friendships with politicians on both sides of the aisle and both ends of the spectrum.

I just want him to sharpen his message.

As for Trump, he is a lost cause. Watch any of those campaign rally riffs on which he lets loose and you get my drift. Or at least you should get it. When he’s not making an ass of himself, he is lying to our faces.

But the MAGA-philes love it. Good for them. They and their hero — Donald Trump — deserve each other.

national news

Biden’s gaffes don’t measure up to Trump’s lies

Oh, here we go again.

Joe Biden said that the Parkland shooting survivors called him while he served as vice president of the United States.

Oops! Except that the high school massacre occurred in 2018; Biden left the vice presidency in January 2017.

The gaffes have been piling up lately. The former VP blurted out he would accept “truth over facts.” Before that he uttered something about “poor kids” doing as well academically as “white kids.”

My goodness. The gaffes reportedly have Democratic voters worried about the former vice president’s intellectual stamina were he to secure the party nomination and then face off against Donald J. Trump.

Which brings me to my point. Are the Biden gaffes as serious as the Trump lies? Hah! Not even close, man! The Trump penchant for prevarication is much, much worse than the occasional blooper that flies out of Biden’s trap.

However … we have this problem with Trump’s incessant lying. We’re getting used to it! The Trump lies — which have totaled something far north of 10,000 since he became president — are becoming part of the dialogue these days. “It’s just Trump,” some Americans are saying.

Many voters don’t seem to care that the president cannot tell the truth if his life depended on it. He lies about everything. Big things. Small things. Important matters. Trivial matters. Trump lies when the truth wouldn’t hurt him in the least. He just lies.

It’s pathological, man … which is how I believe Ben Carson, the nation’s housing secretary, described it when he and Trump were competing for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

If Biden manages to win the Democratic nomination, all of us — you and me — can expect the president to seek to make hay over Biden’s occasional verbal hiccups.

My question is this: Are we going to hold the president to any kind of truth-telling standard? We damn sure had better.

local news, national news, State news

Speaker Rayburn’s credo: Just tell the truth

BONHAM, Texas — The text below the picture posted with this blog item offers a fundamental and irrefutable truth about those who serve in public office.

It is simply to tell the truth at all times. “You don’t have to remember what you said,” the text tells us.

Who said it? The late great U.S. House Speaker Sam Rayburn, arguably Bonham’s favorite son.

He was known simply as Mr. Sam. He mentored many huge Texas political icons, men he taught the lessons of legislating and leadership. He was known to be a plain speaker, a man of enormous integrity. Mr. Sam did not enrich himself at the public trough.

I came to his library and museum today. My wife and I took a tour of the simple but still elegant exhibit and learned a little more about this legendary political figure.

I was struck by the text I cited at the beginning of this blog post because — and you likely know where this is going — of the conduct we have seen exhibited by the current president of the United States, Donald John Trump.

I have no idea how Speaker Rayburn would react to the incessant, relentless and unceasing lies that pour forth from Donald Trump. I only can presume to believe that he would be appalled, aghast and astonished at what would he hear.

The library and museum speak silently but eloquently to the kind of man Rayburn was. He represented his North Texas congressional district with honor, as he did the House of Representatives as the Man of the House.

Sam Rayburn’s honor, to my mind, was built on his effort to speak honestly and truthfully. It is a lesson that is lost totally on too many politicians who have come along after him.

That means you, too, Donald John Trump.

national news

Trump met Reagan, but Reagan never said this

Donald Trump’s lying is becoming more expected all the time, if not quite acceptable.

For instance, Trump today retweeted a message that contained this statement, supposedly from President Ronald Reagan:

“When I met that young man, I felt like I was the one shaking hands with a president.” 

Except that President Reagan didn’t say it. There is no quote attributed to the late 40th president making such a statement about the young real estate investor he met in the late 1980s. The Reagan Library says the statement is false. Politifact calls the statement a “Pants on Fire” lie.

Oh, but here’s the deal: Donald Trump’s glossary of Pants on Fire lies has grown to unfathomable proportions. Trump tells these lies and they seem to roll off our collective backs.

Trump tells a whopper? Hey, it’s no longer a big deal. He defames individuals with scurrilous gossip and innuendo? No sweat, man. Trump mischaracterizes historical events with more lies? Pfftt! Who cares?

Well, I care. So should you. So should any American who believes truth-telling ought to be an essential requirement in the individual who takes an oath to defend and protect us against our enemies and to honor the Constitution of the United States.

Telling the truth is not part of this president’s DNA. He cannot speak the truth. He dredges up fabrications, such as what he did today with that ridiculous lie about President Reagan. I am forced to ask: To what end? For what purpose? Why does this man insist on lying when he need not do so?

So help me, this man makes me sick.

national news

This isn’t how you MAGA, Mr. POTUS

Well, Mr. President, you’ve crossed a fascinating threshold so early during your time in the only public office you’ve ever sought.

The Washington Post tally of lies/misstatements/fibs/prevarications has just crossed the 10,000 mark. Are congratulations in order, Mr. President? If so, then I offer them to you.

Your lying — and I’ll stick with that description for the purposes of this blog — has transcended anything many of us can remember.

I’m old enough to recall how presidents have hidden the truth from us. They do so because of because of perceived national security issues that could put the nation in peril if they were to reveal the “whole truth.”

The Vietnam War, the Cold War, specific crises (such as 9/11) all have produced incidences of presidents keeping certain information from the public.

Not you, Mr. President. You lie at every opportunity. You lie when you don’t need to lie. You’re penchant for making things up simply is mind-blogging/blowing in the extreme.

I have to wonder how you live with yourself. Oh, never mind. I know the answer to that. Your entire life prior to becoming a politician was predicated on self-enrichment. So, I gather that to further your own self you feel as though you had to lie to make yourself look better than you are . . . which I have determined isn’t all that difficult a chore.

Why, you even lied about the size of one of those buildings that has your name on it, inflating it by 10 stories.

You make these outrageous claims of being the “most” this or that, or the “best” at whatever you endeavor to do. One cannot categorize those as lies, per se.

However, you are really and truly good at lying.

Well done, Mr. President.

I just want to note that lying your way through life is not going to “make America great again.” Really. That, sir, is the truth.

national news

Trump vows that no future president should go through it

That’s fine, Mr. President. Go ahead and make your blustering claim to promise that no future president should endure what you have brought upon yourself.

Robert Mueller says you didn’t collude with Russians who attacked our electoral system. Yes, the former FBI director has locked arms with intelligence chiefs in acknowledging what you (in)famously denied in the presence of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.

I accept, Mr. President, that Mueller did what he was charged to do, which was to determine whether you were a “Russian asset” during the 2016 election. He said you were not. I accept Mueller’s findings.

However, if you intend to ensure that no future president should go through what you went through, the burden falls on American voters. We shouldn’t elect pathological liars to the office of president. That is what we got when you won the Electoral College vote in 2016.

Mr. President, you lie gratuitously. You lie on matters large and small. You are incapable of telling us the truth, sir. Your minions lied on your behalf about the Russians and about your relationships with them. They lie. You lie.

How are we supposed to take a single, solitary thing you say as true, Mr. President? I know the answer to that rhetorical question. We cannot believe anything that comes out of your mouth. You are untrustworthy in the extreme.

My goodness, you lied about “total exoneration” even as Attorney General William Barr was telling us that Mueller did not exonerate you on the obstruction of justice allegation.

So, let’s stop with the threats of retribution and your empty promise to prevent “future presidents” from answering the questions that have been posed to you and your associates.

The burden is ours, Mr. President. We need to turn you out of office next year and elect someone who is capable of telling us the truth.

national news

Trump asserts Democrats ‘hate’ this country

Donald John Trump provided plenty of commentary material during his record-setting soliloquy in front of the Conservative Political Action Conference this past weekend.

Let’s look briefly at this tidbit: He said that many in Congress — namely Democrats — “hate this country.”

There you go. That is an example of the height — or the depth — of cynicism rarely, if ever, heard from the president of the United States.

Trump’s foes “hate” the country they serve. They “hate” what the country stands for. They “hate” the nation’s values.

They take the same oath that the president takes. They pledge to defend the U.S. Constitution and to protect the nation against our enemies. They swear allegiance to the United States of America, just like Trump did.

“Hate” is such an ugly four-letter word. Don’t you think?

When it flies out of the mouth of the president of the United States and is aimed at his foes, then it falls into the category of dangerous rhetoric. 

This is Trump at his worst. He is talking only to his base. He doesn’t give a sh** about the rest of the country’s citizens, its voters. The president is relying on his base to shore up his faltering status as the nation’s head of state/commander in chief.

The CPAC crowd gave him plenty of whoops and hollers as he railed on and on for 122 minutes, setting a personal record for longwinded speechmaking. They don’t care about the cynicism, let alone the lies that continue to spew forth from POTUS’s pie hole.

Then he says his opponents “hate” the United States. The CPAC faithful cheered.

So help me, this guy is a disgrace to his high office.