Donald Trump is justifying his giant military push at the border with a pack of lies about the caravan of asylum-seekers that’s still hundreds of miles from that border … but the capper is his claim that “I always like to be truthful.” It’s like the two-door riddle where one guard always tells the truth and one always lies, except here there’s one president and he always lies.
In an interview with ABC's Jonathan Karl, Trump provided a flashback to the day after his inauguration, insisting that “You have caravans coming up that look a lot larger than it’s reported actually. I’m pretty good at estimating crowd size. And I’ll tell you they look a lot bigger than people would think.” (For the record, the link in that quote came straight from ABC News—that is their shade, not mine.)
Trump made liberal use of the Fox News talking point that a group of people, many of them young children, coming to legally seek asylum, are an “invasion.” When Karl objected that “what we see is a lot of deeply impoverished people fleeing violence, many of them women and children,” Trump insisted that “It’s a lot of young people, lot of young men—they are pushing the women right up to the front—not good—and the kids right up to the front.” Even if he is correct on that, though, that’s still a lot of women and children … and impoverished men fleeing violence, many of them with their children, deserve safety, too. Instead, Trump plans to have them met, weeks or months from now when however many of them eventually make it to the border to legally request asylum, by about as many troops as the U.S. currently has in Afghanistan.
So that was a pack of lies. But none of it was as flagrant as the lie Trump told about himself:
"Well, I try. I do try ... and 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," Trump said.
As tempting as it is to crack a “if this is what it looks like when he tries to be truthful, I’d hate to see it if he stopped trying” joke, that’s giving him too much credit. This is yet another lie, coming from a man who tells the same lie again and again, even when it was false the first time and he was called out on it. This is a man who says contradictory things within minutes of each other. Donald Trump lies about things big and small, as one of his most ingrained habits. Lying is like breathing to this man—which is why even his answer about his lies is a lie.
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