Dishonest Donald, the president with his pants on fire, invents a ficticious poll
Well, that's not really accurate. Other politicians lie when they have to, or at least when it serves their purpose at the moment, and generally when they think they can get away with it. They care about at least being perceived as truthful But Mr. Trump seems to lie for the sheer joy of lying, even when he doesn't have to, and does it with a reckless abandon unparalleled by any president or national politician in our history. "Truthful hyperbole," he called it in The Art of the Deal, although there is nothing truthful about it, and it generally goes far beyond hyperbole. And the man who once bragged that he could commit murder at high noon on Fifth Avenue in New York and still not lose any votes seems, at least that time, to be telling the truth: no matter what the evidence, or how transparent the lie, Mr. Trump's supporters insist that he is telling the truth, and that reality is "fake news."
It's surreal. Mr. Trump's supporters, like Mr. Trump himself, have made up their minds what they want to believe, and refuse to be confused by mere facts. It was his primary appeal during the campaign for the Republican nomination that he said what his supporters wanted to hear, regardless of how absurd it might be, Those who converted to his cause after his nomination, and who support him still, somehow find a way to ignore his distant acquaintance with the truth, or seek to excuse it by saying that "all politicians lie," or play their standard card in defense of Mr. Trump: imply that because "all politicians lie," or because Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Bill Clinton also lied, that somehow gets Mr. Trump off the hook.
And that, of course, is not only illogical but based on a false premise. Admittedly, the New York Times, like the mainstream media generally, was pro-Obama and is anti-Trump, and the president's supporters would be perfectly within their rights to challenge their analysis (though I doubt that such a challenge would stand close examination). In any event, the Times concluded that Mr. Trump told six times as many lies during the first ten months of his presidency as Mr. Obama told in eight years! Yes, Bill Clinton did have sex with that woman, and his attempt to (wrongly) parse the word "sex" to mean "vaginal intercourse" doesn't change the fact that it was intended to deceive. No, most Americans were not able to opt to continue their previous insurance plans under Medicare, and Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction at the moment we invaded Iraq despite the consensus of the world's intelligence communities to the contrary. But for the most part, both Mr. Obama's false statements and Mr. Bush's tended to be things they honestly believed at the time to be true, though there were undoubtedly exceptions. And both tended to stop repeating false statements when they realized that they were false. Mr. Trump, by contrast, typically responds to having his statements exposed as false by doubling down, as when he misrepresented London Mayor Sadiq Khan's statement in the wake of the London terrorist attack last year and then repeated it when his mistake was pointed out to him. It's almost as if Mr. Trump believes himself unable to be wrong.
The president today cited what seems to be an entirely mythical poll showing him with a 52% approval rating. In fact, only four major polls since May of 2017 have not shown more Americans disapproving than approving of his performance as president. The most recent one, which showed a tie between his approval and disapproval ratings, was a Reuters-Ipsos poll taken over the New Year's holiday.
His approval ratings have averaged throughout his presidency from the high thirties to the low forties. Recent polls give him an average approval rating of 41,4% favorable and 53.4% unfavorable, a margin of 12 points. Interestingly, the last Fox News poll is his worst recent poll. It showed him fully 16 points "underwater," with 41% favorable and 57% unfavorable.
Mr. Trump's penchant for making up "alternative facts" and false statistics apparently on the spot as needed to put himself in the post favorable possible light has been a constant ever since the Republican debates in 2016. So has the stubborn willingness of his supporters to insist that his delusional world is the real one and that actual facts are "fake news."
The Washington Post has documented some 4,229 lies or misleading statements by Mr. Trump since he took office. The president lies with incredible abandon and seemingly no compunction. An astounding 69% of the claims which Mr. Trump made during his campaign which PolitiFact checked were found to be "mostly false" (22%), "false" (33%) or "pants on fire" (14%).
There is a method to this madness. Politico's interesting article on the psychology of Trump-style falsehood-bombing is instructive. The BBC website has another interesting article on the "Big Lie" and how it works here.
The concept is attributed to Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels, but it actually originated in Adolf Hitler's autobiography and political manifesto Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"). It boils down to the principle that any lie, if repeated often enough and loudly enough, will come to be accepted as true. Goebbels seemed to be firmly convinced that by accusing one's opponent of that of which one is in fact guilty oneself, not only can the opponent be discredited but the person making the accusation can protect himself from having to be accountable for her own misdeeds. Hence, probably the most dishonest president in our history regularly denounces anything negative said about himself, regardless of its truth or falsehood, as "fake news."
As I've said many times, Donald Trump is not Hitler. If the truth be told, he's probably not even Mussolini. We needn't fear that he's going to have anyone killed either in some kind of political or racial holocaust or as part of the kind of Mafia-style program of serial murder like the crazier critics of the Clintons attribute to them. He is not a totalitarian- though he certainly is an authoritarian, and when all is said and done that has always been his primary appeal to the authoritarians who are most strongly attraated to him.
But authoritarianism, too, is incompatible with our democratic values, and no republic can thrive when its leaders build their regime on lies. In an age of intellectual and moral decline in which fewer and fewer Americans believe that such a thing as absolute truth even exists, a regime whose stock-in-trade is the lie and whose supporers, when confronted by that fact, try to minimize the seriousness of that fact and relativize not only the truth but the obligation of our leaders to tell us the truth is especially dangerous. To reffuse to hold our leaders responsible for their deliberate attempts to deceive us because other leaders have lied to us in the past is to lower the bar for truthfulness beyond the level at which a free people can govern themselves.
If we don't insist that our leaders tell us the truth, and hold them accountable when they don't, we aren't going to remain free for long. And when a president is permitted to make repeated and outrageous lies the very foundation of his administration, the experiment that began in 1789 in Philadelphia is perilously close to having failed.
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