Presidential Lies

I have written before about President Trump’s lying.  He apparently didn’t read my post, as his lies or misleading statements are now over 11,000, ranging from the obvious and harmless (claiming his inauguration crowd far exceeded Obama’s) to lies with potential to impact opinion and policy (details here.)

• The President has repeatedly (34 times as of June 2, 2019) asserted that the immigrants “pouring over the border” are criminals, racists, drug lords, human traffickers.  This is just not true.  Numerous peer-reviewed studies (for example, here) show that illegal immigrants are arrested at lower rates than citizens. 
• Trump has repeated 21 times that “our great Country has spent an astounding 7 trillion dollars in the Middle East over the last 19 years.”  Apparently the $7 trillion figure comes from a source predicting a $7 trillion cumulative total (including veterans' medical costs, disability benefits, and interest on the debt) by 2050.
• “The Democrats and President Obama gave Iran 150 Billion Dollars and got nothing,” tweeted Trump.  In actual fact, this money belonged to Iran in the first place but had been frozen in foreign banks because of the sanctions.  Lifting the sanctions was a condition of the nuclear agreement with Iran.  According to almost all sources, Iran had complied completely with the agreement.  One may argue about whether the agreement was worth it, but one cannot sensibly argue that Obama got “nothing.”
• The President has claimed that "the [Mexican border] Wall is under construction and moving along quickly." In fact, out of the 1,954 miles of border, not quite fifty have been built, and much of that is replacement of previously built, dilapidated fencing.

The list goes on. 

Ordinarily, the press and politicians would point them out, subverting the lies' power.  But the President speaks into a right-wing echo chamber.  For the first time in our country's history, as I’ve written before, we now have a national news source (Fox News) that acts as a propaganda arm of the Administration.  Fox is the most-watched cable news source and is indirectly the primary source of news for Trump supporters.  For vast numbers of the American population, then, Fox News is the only media information they are exposed to. 

In another part of the echo chamber, virtually none of the active leaders of the Republican Party have repudiated the President's lies; rather, they have reinforced and amplified them. 

Furthermore, in another ongoing lie with dire consequences, the president has labeled the mainstream media “fake news,” which means that, for those supporters who believe his lies, objectively accurate information and commentary are essentially unavailable.

When citizens can't differentiate between truth and lies, they can't access the wisdom to meaningfully exercise their right to vote. 


"All presidents lie," goes the rejoinder.  Well, yes, but none has vaguely approached the quantity of Trump's lies.  More importantly, when caught, previous presidents have tried to equivocate or claim that they weren't really lying.  Or they have just stopped telling the lie.  It would have been unthinkable for an earlier president to continue telling an easily disprovable lie.  They would have been pilloried.  Unlike President Trump, previous presidents recognized the norm: Presidents don't lie.

While the lies may be obvious to some, they deeply affect the country, anyway.

Trump’s policy and political lies can have a significant impact on public opinion, particularly with those who are favorably disposed toward him.  Systematic research in psychology and political science has demonstrated that once “misinformation” is initially encoded in a person’s mind, it is very difficult to change perceptions through credible corrections. In fact, attempted corrections often reinforce the initial misinformation.

The impact of the “birther” lie is a good example.  Trump was the most prominent supporter of the lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and, therefore, ineligible to be president.  Even after Trump acknowledged the lie, 37% of Republicans believed that President Obama was not born in the United States, and 63% said they had some doubts about his origins.  The lie persists.

Perhaps the most important consequence of Trump’s lies, is that, for large swaths of the country, there are no longer objective facts but only Trump's assertions vs the "fake news" of the mainstream media.  It will be obvious to most politicians that Trump has not suffered but has been rewarded for his lying.  The likely result is that for much of the electorate, even the most egregious lie will become an acceptable political tool.  Few Americans now trust government anyway, but, from now on, how will American citizens be expected to trust government at all?

Presidential lying has been normalized; nobody is surprised; few are even appalled. 

The consequences for our democracy boggle the imagination.  How Democracies Die by Levitsky and Ziblatt (pp 198-99) summarizes:

When the president of the United States lies to the public, our access to credible information is jeopardized, and trust in government is eroded.…  When citizens do not believe their elected leaders, the foundations of representative democracy weaken.  The value of elections is diminished when citizens have no faith in the leaders they elect.

We have entered a twilight zone in which, for massive portions of our country, truth is no longer discernible.  How is any political conversation or policy discussion conceivable?  How is democracy even possible when citizens inhabit separate universes of truth and meaning?