When the history of this era is written, I wonder what historians will say about Donald Trump’s presidency. Will they say he smashed the norms of governance? Will they say he harnessed our propensity to hold grudges? Will they say he was our country’s most successful populist politician?

 

Time will tell. But I think one dominant theme will frame Trump’s place in history: His mastery of lying to justify malevolent ends and — just as grievous — the willingness of millions of Americans to accept and defend his lies. Trump has normalized wholesale fabrications; we’ve come to expect him to invent “alternate facts.” He has put the power to get away with lying right up there with other presidential powers enumerated in the Constitution. 

 

When Trump swaggered onto the political scene, he’d already earned the reputation as a self- aggrandizing playboy, a roguish businessman who defied convention and ethics, a publicity hound. On his way to becoming a fabulist, he shamelessly exaggerated his deal-making savvy and his wealth. But beneath his affinity for bombast and lying lurked a darker, vitriolic Trump. No longer merely a jackass, he became a vengeful jackass. No longer fulfilled by glorifying himself, he developed a mastery for demeaning — and lying about — just about anything: people who didn’t bow and scrape, minorities, the poor, government workers, the media, and countries — often allies— that he decided were taking advantage of us. 

 

Who can forget his vicious attack in 2015, during his first presidential campaign, when he mocked a severely disabled reporter who 14 years earlier had challenged  Trump’s lie about seeing American Muslims dancing in the streets when the World Trade Center towers collapsed on 9/11. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX9reO3QnUA 

 

Four years earlier, in 2011, Trump smeared President Barack Obama with the lie that Obama was a closet Muslim born outside the United States and therefore not qualified to run for  president. Racial politics at its worst, but worth it to Trump because it kept him in the headlines. To this day, Trump piles lie upon lie, insisting for instance that the protester shot dead by an ICE agent in Minneapolis had it coming because she tried to ram the agent with her car.

 

Trump’s lies have ranged from the simply absurd (his annual physicals that rate  him the fittest president ever) to the truly evil and malicious (Haitian refugees eating household pets in Springfield, Ohio). The Washington Post used to keep track of his prevarications and the numbers were mind-blowing: 30,573 lies during his first term alone, according to The Post. But who’s counting anymore? Trump’s biggest and baddest lie — that he won the 2020 presidential election — still scars the country, with another election he plans to undermine around the corner in November.

 

The lies told by Trump and his people speak volumes about their personal mendacity. They also show how lying became an essential ingredient for making policy, particularly with the administration’s campaign of cruelty against dark-skinned immigrants. 

 

The wanton shooting of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis is illustrative. Despite video evidence to the contrary, our government insisted that a) Good tried to kill the ICE agent by running him over with her car, and b) that Good and her wife were/are domestic terrorists. Two bald-faced lies planted during a brief news conference by the reprehensible, narcissistic, dog-killing buffoon who runs the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem. Her lies were fertilized and watered by Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance, who parroted them as prima facie facts. Afterward, scores of rank-and-file MAGAs glommed onto the administration’s version of the murder. Trump’s most obsequious lap dog, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, told Fox News that his takeaway was that people who try to run over law enforcement officers do so at their own peril. Further down the MAGA feeding chain was publicity hungry Nancy Mace, congresswoman/drama queen from the S.C. Lowcountry. Ever-eager to please the Liar in Chief, she echoed Graham’s sentiments. 

 

So our government’s lies became official policy: Renee Good was killed because she tried to run over an ICE agent. Period. Full stop. Don’t believe what you see  on television.

 

This is where we end up when lying by high-level officials is normalized, when lying becomes business as usual rather than unacceptable deception. Malign acts by agents of an out-of-control autocracy are papered over with propaganda that tells us to ignore plain facts. And, God help us, what about the millions of people who’ve never seen the shooting on TV? They might believe Trump’s propaganda. Lies beget lies, and as Mark Twain famously said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is just getting its boots on.”  

 

All those old white men in the Republican Party are peddling the notion that Good was a dangerous leftist. Good’s wife is also getting a look from the Justice Department, which suspects her of domestic terrorism. This is the icing on the cake. Smear the murder victim with lies and then use your favorite tactic — cruelty — to make her widow suffer. J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller must be gloating. 

 

Don’t get me wrong. Trump is perfectly capable of evil and not bothering to lie about it, especially because he knows he won’t be held accountable. He came dangerously close to telling the truth about our invasion of Venezuela. After pretending it was all about drug smuggling, he more or less admitted it was all about oil in the days following the raid. Trump’s cult lets him do anything that benefits him, his family members or his cronies. He’s made no bones about boldly and unapologetically dismantling every measure taken by his predecessors to fight climate change. He loves the coal, oil, and gas industries and wants them to thrive. And they love him back. So what if oceans and temperatures rise dangerously.

 

Who’s to blame for truth being flushed out of American governance? There’s plenty of blame to go around. 

 

First, the people who benefit most from the lies — Trump himself, Stephen Miller, J.D. Vance, the vacuous Barbie wannabe Kristi Noem and the scores of other appointees who do Trump’s bidding. They all crave power and notoriety and Trump and his lies provide both.

 

Second, people who cheer on the lies because doing so keeps them close to power. Two examples: Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, S.C.’s junior senator. If you’ve seen the video of Trump’s attacking Fed Chairman Jay Powell during a tour of the Federal Reserve building’s renovation, you know Scott was Trump’s wing man. Scott played the role of Trump toady to perfection. Then there are the photos taken aboard Air Force One showing Graham  gazing up admiringly at the president with puppy-like affection as Trump defends Goode’s murder. Graham’s adoration reminds me of the way the simpering Mike Pence used to look at Trump, as if he were some religious figure, the hem of whose garment deserved a kiss. 

 

And let’s not overlook our cowardly House speaker, Mike Johnson. While he doesn’t suck up to Trump with the ardor of Graham and Scott, he is every bit as tolerant of Trump’s lies. In fact, I think Johnson might whip Trump in a contest for most talented liar.

 

Does anybody despair about the perverse effect lying has on democratic values? Do the business titans, the CEOs? No, they don’t. Does Wall Street? Are you kidding? “The market” hits new highs daily. The mainstream media? Certainly Fox News is in lock-step with MAGA mendacity. CNN and MSNow do push back against Republicans who lie but too politely. I give them a C for their opposition. How about former presidents? Do they swat back the lies? Clinton? Not really and even if he did his own record for truth-telling is blemished. Bush 2? He gets an F; nary a peep out of him. Obama? He has objected, but only mildly. I hope he’s just warming up. He gets a C for potential.

 

When I was growing up, lying brought consequences. Whether you lied or someone lied to you, a reckoning was likely, perhaps even a fist fight. 

Now we don’t even wince when the president fibs bigly. Certainly not when he misstates facts on small matters, if there’s such a thing as a small matter for a president. Even when Trump lies about matters of great consequence, the sad reality is that most Americans don’t react. Instead, we accept his lying as the new normal — the rule rather than the exception — instead of raging against his betrayal of us and the Constitution.

 

Mass-produced lying by this administration will almost certainly continue for the remaining three years of Trump’s term. At 79, Trump is the oldest president ever to begin a new term, and at that age, he’s not going to break a lifelong bad habit. He’s also surrounded himself with people who aid and abet his lying. The pushback he occasionally encountered during his first term is nonexistent now. 

 

My fondest hope is that by the time mid-term congressional elections roll ’round in November, Americans will be so sick of Republican lying that Democrats take back the House of Representatives. Absent that, I dread the next three years under an unfettered Trump.

 

You should, too, unless you’re lying to yourself about the cruelty and upheaval those three years will bring.

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