Legend has it that when George Washington was about six years old, he tried his hatchet on a beautiful young English cherry tree, ending the tree’s beauty (and life).
When George’s father asked young George if he had chopped down his favorite tree, legend (again) has it that the future first president of our country bravely admitted, “I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.”
Compare the legend to the harsh, ugly reality 280 years later when the 45th president of the United States tells ABC News: “I always want to tell the truth. When I can, I tell the truth. And sometimes it turns out to be where something happens that’s different or there’s a change, but I always like to be truthful.”
Apparently, 5,000-plus times during the past 20 months this president wanted to tell the truth, but just could not bring himself to do it.
A week ago, Trump claimed that Democrats oppose any effort to secure our border, a claim that pegged PolitiFact National’s truth-o-meter needle at “False.”
Yesterday, the 45th president of the United States told reporters, without a shred of evidence to support it, that billionaire George Soros is funding the caravan in Mexico
Again yesterday, just five days before the midterm elections, came the most grotesque lie in the form of “the most racially charged national political ad in 30 years, [where] President Donald Trump and the Republican Party accuse Democrats of plotting to help people they depict as Central American invaders overrun the nation with cop killers.”
The ad, worse than the notorious “Willie Horton” campaign ad during the 1988 presidential election, “carries added weight since, unlike its 1988 predecessor, it bears the official endorsement of the leader of the Republican Party — Trump — and is not an outside effort,” says CNN, which adds, “Given that Trump distributed it from his Twitter account, It also comes with all the symbolic significance of the presidency itself.”
Some historians may debate whether our first president continued such rigorous honesty during his 40 years of public service. But at least four contemporaries believe so:
Both his enemies and his friends bore evidence to his honesty. Jefferson said, “his integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known, no motives of interest or consanguinity or friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision. He was indeed in every sense of the words, a wise, a good, and a great man.” Pickering wrote that “to the excellency of his virtues I am not disposed to set any limits. All his views were upright, all his actions just” Hamilton asserted that “the General is a very honest Man;” and Tilghman spoke of him as “the honestest man that I believe ever adorned human nature.”
Will Trump’s contemporaries or, for that matter, any historian be able to make similar statements about ”45” with a straight face?
Sad!
CODA: If you have the stomach, you can view the shocking, racist ad here.
Leadimage: Joseph Gruber, “Cherry Blossoms and a reflected Washington Monument”
