Tag Archives: Trump’s lying

Trump’s words have zero value

Once, long ago when I was a much younger man, I used to hang on the president of the United States’ every word. When he spoke them, I just knew he was telling me at least his version of the truth.

Was he shading the truth a little to make himself sound better and feel better? Oh, probably. It didn’t matter as long as the fundementals of his statement were based in fact.

The current president? The guy we’ve got in power for the next three years? I have turned 180 degrees in the opposite direction.

I believe nothing that comes from Donald Trump’s overfed pie hole. Zero. Nothing he says means anything to me at this stage of his time in office or in my life as an American patriot.

Please understand that I take no joy in harboring this cynical view. I am not a cynic by nature, unlike some of my former journalism colleagues who actually used to boast about their cynicism. A cynical approach to covering the news or commenting on it is as unhealthy as being gullible enough to believe every single word that comes from a politician.

The current White House occupant, however, has filled even me with cynicism that I find uncomfortable. How can that be? His lying over any issue imaginable — from the epic to the trivial — has become the stuff of legend. The Washington Post counted something like 30,000 instances of lying during Trump’s first term in office from January 2027 until January 2021. No telling how many more thousands of lies he has told just in the first year of his second term.

I will stipulate one more time that I do revere the office of president. It is noble, grand and powerful. Donald Trump has done all he can do to diminish the office in my own mind’s standing. He’s done so by lying whenever he has something to say.

Yearning for a POTUS who can be trusted

The doubting, the questioning and the suspicion about the president of the United States never ends.

Donald Trump’s relentless lying about the coronavirus pandemic has become, if you’ll please pardon the intended pun, almost an epidemic of its own.

His downplaying of the crisis initially was bad enough. His declaration about the alleged ease of obtaining tests to determine exposure matched it. Then came the televised speech from the Oval Office, a venue reserved only for the most serious of matters. Trump bungled that, too, by declaring a travel ban, but failing to tell us that U.S. citizens who were in Europe would be able to return home.

None of this, of course, is surprising to millions of Americans … such as me. We have doubted this individual’s veracity at every turn. The Washington Post tally of lies/falsehoods/misstatements/prevarication is now past 17,000 — and counting! And that’s just in a single term, the end of which is nearly a year out!

Donald Trump is failing this critical test of presidential leadership. He has piled too many lies all around him to be able to climb toward any level of credibility. The lying has been non-stop, incessant since the moment he became a politician. He sought his first-ever public office — the presidency — by telling us a lie about how he became a zillionaire: He called himself “self-made,” but he lied about that! The lying hasn’t stopped.

So here is facing the worst crisis — one not of his making — of his presidency and his hideous record of lying has turned us all into a nation of skeptics. We can’t trust a single word that comes from this fellow. It’s even come to doubting the veracity of the White House announcement that he has been tested for the coronavirus.

So, the crisis will worsen. We’ll hear from medical experts, the truth tellers who surround the president. We’ll also hear from Donald Trump. I, though, will be among those who cannot trust his word.