After last night's Super Bowl game, as I'm sure you know, that guy in the Oval Office tweeted…
Congratulations to the Kansas City Chiefs on a great game and a fantastic comeback, under immense pressure. You represented the Great State of Kansas and, in fact, the entire USA, so very well. Our Country is PROUD OF YOU!
Someone must have pointed out quickly that while the states of Kansas and Missouri kinda share the Chiefs and there is a Kansas City in Kansas, the Chiefs are technically based in Kansas City, Missouri. A few minutes later, the first tweet was deleted — as if deleting a tweet received by millions makes it disappear as if it never existed — and Trump tweeted…
Congratulations to the Kansas City Chiefs on a great game and a fantastic comeback under immense pressure. We are proud of you and the Great State of Missouri. You are true Champions!
I would have had a higher opinion of D. Trump if the second tweet had been more like…
Oops! My thumbs got carried away. I meant to say that the glorious states of Missouri (where the Chiefs play) and Kansas (which roots for them) both have a right to be very proud.
But that would have violated a cardinal rule of the Trump administration, one that I actually suspect is drilled into everyone who joins it as part of the welcoming orientation. Donald Trump never apologizes for anything and he only admits he's wrong about one out of every thousand times he is. And if I'm wrong about how often he admits errors, it's because the actual ratio is worse than that.
I'm kind of amazed he doesn't see the value of admitting errors, at least about little screw-ups that don't matter one bit. Would he have lost a scintilla of respect from even one person who respects him if he'd owned the mistake instead of pretending it never happened? It might make it more credible when he denies errors about something important…like whether or not Hurricane Dorian was going to hit Alabama. (Newly released e-mails reveal just how bad a lie was being disseminated when Trump defended his error to the death, as he does with most of them.)
Today, Trump backers are out in force trying to claim that Trump's first tweet (i.e., the one that was quickly deleted) was not wrong…and they don't even believe that. It's just something you have to say when it's verboten to admit he was wrong about anything. And then of course, they make the leap to "Obama did the same thing" bringing up some mistake he made, like the famous time he referred to "all 57 states." But there are two differences there.
One is that Obama never thought there were 57 states. Sometimes, we all misspeak…like a verbal typo. I occasionally mistype my own name and don't notice. That does not mean I don't know how to spell my own name. In his speech when Jimmy Carter accepted his party's nomination to run for president, he sought to praise one of the men he'd bested for the position. Even though it was right on the TelePrompter and right on the typescript in front of him, he referred not to Hubert Horatio Humphrey but to "Hubert Horatio Hornblower."
Trump makes those kinds of mistakes all the time. We all do. They do not indicate stupidity or lack of knowledge. Ah, but defending them suggests a lack of humility and maybe a stubborn belief that the people are so stupid, they can be convinced you didn't X when they all heard you say X.
And of course the other difference is that Obama admitted his gaffe and laughed about it. Trump rarely demonstrates any ability at all to laugh at himself and on the rare occasions when he tries, it sounds forced and awkward. I don't know about you but I'm scared at the prospect of any person in power who, when caught in a mistake, can't own up to it; whose first instinct is to double-down on the error.
There's a difference between one of those verbal typos and actual mistakes because of missing or faulty knowledge. And then there are the premeditated, deliberate lies…like when you know your administration is doing its damnedest to remove coverage for pre-existing conditions and you're out there saying, "I stand stronger than anyone in protecting your Healthcare with Pre-Existing Conditions."
And in Trump, we often get a fourth category of lie, which is denying what he said even though there were eight cameras and twenty microphones there capturing it. So we get all these lists of Trump Lies, like the one maintained by the Washington Post. On the third anniversary of Trump's inauguration, it stood at 16,241.
I think some of the ones they list are unfair because they're in the "misspeak" category and a lot of them — like saying "We've never had an economy like this before" — are subjective. You could probably argue that at any day in the history of the U.S., the economy was not exactly the same as it was on any other day, good or bad. But what's horrifying about the list is the number of times he said something that was blatantly untrue and said it over and over and over. Those are not verbal typos. Obama only mentioned the 57 states once.
This is not me trying to convince anyone Trump is a dishonest man. I operate on the assumption that no swing voters read this blog, that the Trump supporters who do come here are small in number and that if they do change their minds about him, it will be because of his words and actions, not because of me or anyone else. Every now and then though, I feel the need to articulate (if only to myself) one of the many reasons I think he's an awful president and a worse human being. And that disconnect from the truth and inability to admit mistakes is a big one.
[Correction: The original version of this post referred to Trump as "a worse human being." In truth, it has not been established that he is a human being at all.]