Reign of Error

The Washington Post fact checkers say that in his 347 days in office, Donald Trump has made 1,950 false or misleading assertions. It is perhaps worth noting that the URL for this article says 1,949 false or misleading statements so one of those numbers is wrong.

If we want to be fair to Trump — and I'm at a loss to explain why anyone would — a lot of items on the list of 1,950 (or 1,949) are repeats or statements which could be interpreted in some way that is technically true. But even if you whittle the list down to half its present length, that's still something like three a day, including all those days where he was playing golf like he said he wouldn't do.

Ah, I can remember when his political opponents called Al Gore a "congenital liar" who was not to believed even if he told you what day of the week it was. They had a list of around ten examples, some of which involving misquoting him a bit. Like, he said "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet" and his detractors got away with changing it to "I invented the Internet" and branding him a liar.

My take on all this is that we really don't care in this country if someone lies to us if they're on our team. "Liar" is a label you only hang on a political opponent and Trump found it very useful to refer to "Lying Hillary" or "Lying Ted" or any member of the press who wrote or said something he didn't like.

The other adjective he does that with is "failing." Any business he doesn't like is failing, regardless of how well they're actually doing…like the New York Times is the "failing New York Times" even though its circulation and revenues are on the rise. I suppose if you called Trump on his use of that descriptor, he'd say he meant that they're failing the American public by printing all those lies. And he'd probably claim credit for any increase in their business, claiming it's because they write so much about him. It must be nice to live in a world where when you win, you win…and when you lose, you insist you won and that's just as good.