Presidential candidate Donald Trump made a lot of promises on his way to the White House. Most ranged from the outright laughable to the literally impossible. Predictably, very few of Trump’s guarantees came to pass. He did not “build a wall” and have Mexico pay for it. President Trump did not provide health “insurance for everybody.” Far from eliminating the entire national debt of the United States “over a period of 8 years,” the Trump administration has hemorrhaged trillions more red ink. The mushrooming annual Trump budget deficits are fueled in part by his $1.5 trillion tax cut windfall for the wealthy, which most certainly did not “pay for themselves. As for his pledge to average 4 percent annual economic growth, Trump isn’t even close.
But of all Trump’s vows to the American people, one stands out as his “meta” broken promise. Three years ago today on August 18, 2016, Donald Trump under the new management of Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway rebooted his campaign with this pledge:
But one thing I can promise you is this: I will always tell you the truth.
I speak the truth for all of you, and for everyone in this country who doesn’t have a voice. [Emphasis mine.]
If that was candidate Trump’s contract with the American people, it’s fair to say President Trump has been in breach since the moment he took the oath of office. Even as he spoke three years ago, Politifact was reporting that roughly 70 percent of the Trump statements it evaluated were rated either Mostly False, False, or Pants on Fire. As of this writing, that ratio has hardly budged since Donald Trump was inaugurated. By the New York Times’ count, “In his first 10 months, Trump told nearly six times as many falsehoods as Obama did during his entire presidency.” As of August 5, 2019, the Washington Post updated its ongoing tally of Donald Trump’s lies to a total of 12,019 in 928 days.
Like the sun rising in the east and setting in the west, the pace and magnitude of Trump’s falsehoods was perfectly knowable at the time. Nevertheless, the American media gave Trump speech that day fawning reviews.
Donald Trump will always tell you the truth, up to 30 percent of the time.
As ABC News put it:
Donald Trump on Thursday appeared to stash away the bravado he has displayed at his rallies, apologizing for what appears to be the first time for his controversial words on the campaign trail and saying "I will never lie to you."
"Sometimes, in the heat of debate, and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don’t choose the right words or you say the wrong thing. I have done that, and believe it or not I regret it," Trump said.
In “Trump, speaking after campaign shake-up, expresses regret over causing ‘personal pain,’” the Washington Post reported that “the Republican presidential nominee sought to frame himself as a truth-telling candidate who occasionally crosses boundaries in that pursuit.” The Post included this quote:
“While sometimes I can be too honest, Hillary Clinton is the exact opposite: She never tells the truth. One lie after another, and getting worse each passing day,” he said. “The American people are still waiting for Hillary Clinton to apologize for all of the many lies she’s told to them, and the many times she’s betrayed them.”
Former Clinton strategist turned Fox News regular Doug Schoen was buying it. On August 22, 2016, he opened a Forbes column titled, “Trump 2.0?” with this breathless reaction to the Charlotte speech four days earlier:
A month ago, no one would’ve guessed that we’d see a contrite Donald Trump.
But he has once again defied reality and in his first speech since Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon took over his campaign, the Donald said he regretted a thing or two.
Was it authentic? No one can really know.
The answer, as all knew—or should have known-- at the time was “no.” Nevertheless, NBC Meet the Press host Chuck Todd dedicated a whole show to the topic on August 28, 2016. His introduction? “This Sunday, Trump 3.0.”
About a week later, Americans learned that Trump had made a $25,000 donation to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. Almost immediately thereafter, the Sunshine State’s investigation into fraud committed by Trump University came to a screeching halt. The campaign and the Republican media machine declared themselves shocked—SHOCKED!—that Donald Trump would be accused of an obvious quid pro quo. On September 5, 2016, the Washington Post’s Paul Waldman described the media dynamic working in Trump’s favor which ensured the story would quickly go away:
It’s not that there isn’t plenty of negative coverage of Trump, because of course there is, but it’s focused mostly on the crazy things he says on any given day…
That’s important, because we may have reached a point where the frames around the candidates are locked in: Trump is supposedly the crazy/bigoted one, and Clinton is supposedly the corrupt one. Once we decide that those are the appropriate lenses through which the two candidates are to be viewed, it shapes the decisions the media make every day about which stories are important to pursue.
And it means that to a great extent, for all the controversy he has caused and all the unflattering stories in the press about him, Trump is still being let off the hook.
President Donald Trump is still being let off the hook 12,019 lies later. That would be the same Donald Trump who three years ago today uttered the words, “One thing I can promise you is this: I will always tell you the truth.”
