PRESIDENT TRUMP’S  PROPENSITY TO LIE

Human beings tell lies and that includes me and you. It is ingrained in our brains. But for the most part, our lies are little ones that harm no-one other than ourselves with respect to our  own credibility.

President Trump on the other hand lies so many times, it makes us wonder if anyone should accept anything he says.

I remember when he told the voters in the United States that he would make public his tax returns before he was elected as the president.  He knew that was an outright lie and that he had no intentions what so ever of making his tax returns public.

Trump’s first year in office was the most dishonest one in history. His lack of honesty in his second year was nearly three times worse.

During Donald Trump’s first year in office, historians had claimed that there has never been a president of the United States who lied so frequently as Trump has.  If his lies were grains of salt, his lies would fill a very large salt shaker.  That is no exaggeration on my part. He has lied to the Americans over 5,000 times.

Trump made 3,135 false claims in his second year in office, it came to 8.6 per day. That was almost three times as many lies he made in his first year which amounted to 1,072 times or 2.9 per day.

The 15 most dishonest weeks of Trump’s presidency all came in the second year, and 23 of the most dishonest statements in 25 weeks. The 15 most dishonest days of his presidency all came in the second year and 45 of the most dishonest lies was 50 of them.

The second-year of his lies were not only incessant, they were  frequently ridiculous and so unsophisticated and so many of them that they could be fact-checked with a single Google search.

Trump lied when he said that the tariffs he imposed and bragged about,  do not exist. He lied 52 times that he was the one who managed to pass the Veterans Choice health care program, which was actually passed by Barack Obama in 2014. Trump lied 30 times that his tariffs had prompted U.S. Steel to open six, seven, eight or nine new plants, notwithstanding that the company was only making investments in two existing plants, however, the actual investments could have made for an effective boast.. But Trump being a liar that he is,  there is rarely an accurate boast he doesn’t think could be improved with some inaccuracy.

“He can’t tell the truth even when the truth is in his favour,” said Rick Tyler, an MSNBC political analyst and former spokesperson for Republicans Ted Cruz and Newt Gingrich, who describes Trump’s lying as “as being pathological.”

“There’s nobody who’s lied like Donald Trump. He lies every day, all day long. To fabricate is part of his nature,” said Rice University presidential historian Douglas Brinkley.

During Trump’s midterm election campaign, there was a fusillade of lying unlike any we have seen before. His worst week ever included 240 false claims, during the week that included the last three days of the campaign. Was it his second-worst week ever?  The week before that, he lied173 times.

Trump is never more dishonest than when improvising in front of his supporters, and a primary factor in the amount of lying Trump does is the number of campaign rallies he holds. Of the ten most dishonest single events of his presidency, nine were done in campaign rallies in 2018.

He lied more times in his second year in office  partly because he talked more that year. He averaged about 25,000 spoken words per week in weeks that began in the second year, up from about 15,000 in the first year. But he also got much more dishonest per word he uttered.

Trump made 88 false claims about immigration in the first year he was in office, fewer than he made about the economy (159), the 2016 election (105), taxes (103), health care (100), the media (99), and about Obama (93).

In his second year in office, he made immigration the centrepiece of his midterm campaign and his government shutdown.  Naturally, he lied about the subjects incessantly, with 584 false claims. He made nearly twice as many false claims in the second year about his proposed border wall, (189), than he did about the entire subject of immigration in the first year.

The United States’ economy was his number one lie as evidence of his dishonesty in his first year. It was number two of the same subject  as proof of his dishonesty in the second year, though with more than three times as many false claims (554).  

Other than the occasional gripe about how fact-checkers are too nitpicky, Trump has been uniquely unresponsive to corrections of his lies. His relentlessness causes Americans who don’t trust him to fits of despair—worried that the country’s apparent inability to stop his deception.  

But Trump’s second-year struggles suggested that his lying is not working at all with the people who will determine his political future.

Two of his biggest lies was his denial of involvement in the hush-money payment he funded to porn performer Stormy Daniel and his denial of campaign-period business dealings with Russia that  were exposed by prosecutors and his former lawyer Michael Cohen. His lies about Obamacare did not help him persuade enough senators from his own party to repeal the law.

A majority of voters weren’t buying the lying, either. His constant lying about immigration problems did not stop Democrats from actually convincingly winning the midterms in the House. And it has not helped Trump to sell the shutdown, which voters overwhelmingly say should have been ended whether or not he gets a border wall, which a majority of voters continues to find unnecessary.

Though Trump keeps insisting that the state of the southern border is a chief national security concern, he just can’t seem to convince 50 per cent of the country that that is true. His lying makes it difficult to believe him on any subject he speaks of. 

 
Liar, Liar, pants on fire. His conflagration is so intense; his political party is engulfed in the flames. For the foreseeable future, there is probably no convincing his loyalists. But Trump is in big trouble because he hasn’t been truthful enough to even earn the faith of anyone else.

We as human beings definitely shouldn’t lie to ourselves. The man who lies to himself and believes his own lies, arrives at a point where he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so he loses all respect for himself and that of others. And having no respect for truth, he ceases to be believed by anyone other than gullible fools.