“Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie — And Why Trump is Worse” by Eric Alterman

“Chapter 16: Donald Trump’s License to Lie

“In the spring of 2019, the Washington Post fact-checking team reported that President Trump made the 10,000th “false or misleading claim” of his presidency, according to the paper’s own ongoing database. It happened 828 days into his term, and the Post editorial page called it “a whopper.” The editors explained, “The president, whose own administration imposed and then rescinded a systematic policy of wrenching migrant children from their parents, with no protocol in place to reunite them, now poses as a paragon of compassion that ended cruel laws in place before he took office. This is false” (1, p. 241).

“Trump told that bald-faced lie during a live televised interview by phone with his private advisor and public cheerleader, Sean Hannity of Fox News. It was his predecessors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, he insisted, who had begun the child separation policy. His administration was blameless: “We’ve been on a humane basis….[W]e go out and stop the separations.” But as the Post editors pointed out, Trump had indeed instituted the policy, and in “an act of singular cruelty,” had done so without making any meaningful effort to ensure the eventual return of those children to their parents or to see to their mental, physical, and emotional health. Many of the children were held in cages. As for his predecessors alleged responsibility, Trump’s own Justice Department had proudly called his policy “new” when announcing it. With his policy and the lies he told about it, Trump, not atypically, “fused inhumanity with incompetence,” in the Post editors’ words, while hiding behind a facade of apparent cluelessness about his own administration’s actions” (1, pp. 241-242).

1. Eric Alterman. Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie —And Why Trump is Worse. New York, Basic Books, 2020.