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Donald Trump’s lying, and his White House’s insistence on pretending he’s not lying, should scare us. Trump keeps talking about phone calls in which important people tell him he’s wonderful, only to have those people deny that any such phone call ever happened. And he’s got press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on the job, denying that Trump lied.
According to Trump, the president of Mexico called to gush about Trump’s effectiveness on immigration, while the head of the Boy Scouts called to tell him what a great speech he’d given. Except it turned out that there has been no recent phone call between Trump and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and the Boy Scouts similarly said none of their top leaders had called Trump to praise his speech. Reporters asked Sanders about this, uh, discrepancy at Wednesday’s press briefing:
In regards to Mexico, Sanders said Trump was referring to a personal conversation from last month’s Group of 20 summit.
On the Boy Scouts, Sanders said Trump did not hear from the president directly, but rather that he had heard from “multiple members of Boy Scout leadership” who offered him “quite powerful compliments.”
“So he lied,” the reporter shot back.
“It wasn't a lie. That's a pretty bold accusation,” Sanders responded. “The conversations took place. They just simply didn't take place over a phone call. He had them in person.”
Is she saying that the commander in chief of the entire U.S. military doesn’t know the difference between a phone call and an in-person conversation? That might almost be worse than a lie. Of course, what’s really going on here is that Sanders is lying to cover up for her boss’s lies. It’s pretty bold of her to call it a bold accusation to label naked lies as lies.
The White House is also energetically pushing back on the Sports Illustrated report that he called the White House “a dump,” with Trump himself tweeting that the report was “TOTALLY UNTRUE” and, you guessed it, “fake news.” But, the reporters explain on a podcast, Trump didn’t just call the White House a dump, he did so “in front of eight or nine members and staffers” at his Bedminster golf club, and it’s “a moment that has already passed into legend at Trump Bedminster.” In other words, the Trump team’s claim that Sports Illustrated had it wrong is yet another lie. At least that one doesn’t involve inventing whole cloth a phone call from a world leader and putting words into his mouth that he hasn’t said and wouldn’t say.