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Is Donald Trump a liar? Maybe not -- and that's when it really gets scary
Our president says blatantly false things all day long. For him, they all serve a large and terrible truth
ANDREW O'HEHIR
JUNE 23, 2018 4:00PM (UTC)
There was and is no law requiring the children of undocumented immigrants to be taken away from their parents at the border. There is no crime wave caused by immigrants in Germany. (That nation’s historically low crime rate has fallen recently, and as in the United States immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens.) There was no measurable number of illegal votes cast in the 2016 election. Donald Trump’s inauguration did not draw the largest crowds in history, and in his first year he did not sign more legislation than any other president. (Indeed, he ranked last among post-World War II presidents.)
Do you want me to go on? I definitely don’t. But how are we to categorize Trump as an unquenchable fount of untruth, who by the Washington Post’s count passed 3,000 “false or misleading statements” as president more than a month ago? Is he a liar, a bullshitter, a gaslighter, a prevaricator, an ignoramus or a delusional sociopath whose relationship to the world of observable reality and established fact is at best “transactional”? I see two viable answers to this question:
1. It’s the wrong question.
2. Yes.
The second answer is correct because Trump uses all those tactics and more, sometimes in ways that seem calculated and sometimes on what looks like pure instinct. Clear back to his first intervention in what could loosely be called politics, when he was a New York tabloid celebrity who took out full-page ads in four daily newspapers calling for the execution of the five young men accused in the “Central Park jogger case” of 1989, Trump has displayed little or no concern for the truth.
In fairness, Trump had no way of knowing that the Central Park Five, who spent years in prison for that horrific rape, would later be proven innocent. Everyone else thought they were guilty too. If their conviction was the most infamous miscarriage of justice produced by the overlapping racial panic and crime panic of that era, it certainly wasn’t the only one. (A remarkable data point, one the president likely views as fake news: There were roughly 2,000 murders a year in New York City between 1988 and 1993. Last year there were 290, the lowest recorded total since 1951.)
What’s far more important is that Trump didn’t care whether those five young black and Latino men were guilty or innocent. The facts of the case were beside the point; their lives were beside the point. (Black lives quite literally did not matter.) Those men were no more than sinister extras in a psychodrama fueled by pure emotion — fear, rage, bitterness, confusion — in which questions of law or fact were irrelevant.
more
https://www.salon.com/2018/06/23/is-donald-trump-a-liar-maybe-not-and-thats-when-it-really-gets-scary/
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