Numerous well-documented articles have been written about the blatant and continuing lies by a certain Republican presidential candidate, president-elect and now president of these United States.
Reminiscent of “putting lipstick on a pig,” those lies are now being cosmeticized by the president’s minions as “alternative facts.”
Charles Blow at the New York Times is not buying any of it. “These are lies; good old-fashioned lies, bald-faced and flat-out lies,” he says.
Reminding us of Trump’s disrespectful remarks about having “a running war with the media,” while “on the hallowed ground before the C.I.A. Memorial Wall,” Blow says, “He is in fact having a running war with the truth itself”:
Donald Trump is a proven liar. He lies often and effortlessly. He lies about the profound and the trivial. He lies to avoid guilt and invite glory. He lies when his pride is injured and when his pomposity is challenged.
One of the greatest threats Trump’s lying poses is that “he corrupts and corrodes the absoluteness of truth, facts and science,” says Blow.
Blow recalls Trump’s and his press secretary’s lying about inauguration crowd sizes and that such a compulsion to lie and to “control the narrative” may in fact “be spilling over into the Trump administration’s approach to government agencies, particularly those with a more scientific leaning.”
This was evidenced by the Trump administration recent clamping down on the use of social media and interaction with the media at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the departments of Commerce, Health and Human Services, Agriculture and the Interior.
And how can we forget about Trump continuing “to rage about three to five million illegal votes causing him to lose the popular vote in November.”
“This, too, is a lie,” Blow says, “A lie. Not the euphemisms you hear on television, like ‘unsubstantiated,’ or ‘unproven,’ or ‘baseless.’ It is a lie, pure and simple.”
Blow:
So, even after his lie is reported and rejected, he continues to perpetuate it. This is what makes Trump qualitatively different from our leaders who came before him: He believes that truth is what he says it is, and the only reason it has yet to be accepted is that it has yet to be sufficiently repeated.
Charles Blow concludes:
We all have to adjust to this unprecedented assault on the truth and stand ready to vigilantly defend against it, because without truth, what’s left? Our president is a pathological liar. Say it. Write it. Never become inured to it. And dispense with the terms of art to describe it. A lie by any other name portends the same
Charles Blow goes a long way towards starting that difficult process described so well by our own Shaun Mullen in his “How the media must respond to Trump if its credibility is to survive him”.
This author, for one, will continue to “Say it. Write it.”
Lead image courtesy Donkeyhotey.com
