So, Trump wants to talk about fake news:
All presidents lie. Richard Nixon said he was not a crook, yet he orchestrated the most shamelessly crooked act in the modern presidency. Ronald Reagan said he wasn’t aware of the Iran-Contra deal; there’s evidence he was. Bill Clinton said he did not have sex with that woman; he did, or close enough. Lying in politics transcends political party and era. It is, in some ways, an inherent part of the profession of politicking.
But Donald Trump is in a different category. The sheer frequency, spontaneity and seeming irrelevance of his lies have no precedent. Nixon, Reagan and Clinton were protecting their reputations; Trump seems to lie for the pure joy of it. A whopping 70 percent of Trump’s statements that PolitiFact checked during the campaign were false, while only 4 percent were completely true, and 11 percent mostly true. (Compare that to the politician Trump dubbed “crooked,” Hillary Clinton: Just 26 percent of her statements were deemed false.)
Those who have followed Trump’s career say his lying isn’t just a tactic, but an ingrained habit. New York tabloid writers who covered Trump as a mogul on the rise in the 1980s and ’90s found him categorically different from the other self-promoting celebrities in just how often, and pointlessly, he would lie to them. In his own autobiography, Trump used the phrase “truthful hyperbole,” a term coined by his ghostwriter referring to the flagrant truth-stretching that Trump employed, over and over, to help close sales. Trump apparently loved the wording, and went on to adopt it as his own.
So, Trump wants to talk about fake news:
President Trump has broken 2,000.
With just 10 days before he finishes his first year as president, Trump has made 2,001 false or misleading claims in 355 days, according to our database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president. That’s an average of more than 5.6 claims a day.
When we started this project, originally aimed at the president’s first 100 days, he averaged 4.9 claims a day. At that pace, it appeared unlikely the president would break 2,000 in a year. But the longer the president has been in the job, the more frequently he touts an assortment of exaggerated, dubious or false claims. (Our full interactive graphic can be found here.)
So, Trump wants to talk about fake news:
It's bad enough that the president of the United States is an inveterate liar. It's even worse when members of Congress and his Cabinet feel compelled to lie on his behalf.
Five days after word leaked out that President Trump used bigoted and vulgar remarks during an Oval Office meeting on immigration, it's clear who's telling the truth. Spoiler alert: It's not the president and his enablers.
So, Trump wants to talk about fake news:
On the day of his inauguration, Trump lied about the weather. The next day, he lied about the size of his inauguration crowd. He has become no less brazen in the 11 months since. The president who won’t change isn’t so much untruthful as anti-truthful, his words so frequently and flagrantly wrong that they amount to a comprehensive rejection of the very idea of accuracy.
The Star has counted 978 false claims since his inauguration, an average of three per day, about everything from media outlets to legislation to the head of the Boy Scouts calling him to pay him a compliment. (Didn’t happen. He just made it up.) As Trump careens from policy to policy and outrage to outrage, lying has been the most consistent feature of his presidency.
“We’ve had presidents that have lied or misled the country, but we’ve never had a serial liar before. And that’s what we’re dealing with here,” said Douglas Brinkley, the prominent Rice University presidential historian. “We haven’t seen anything like this. It’s a storybook, ‘emperor has no clothes’ kind of thing. Or it’s like dictators in countries where they just make up all sorts of crazy things and people are supposed to nod in agreement.”
So, Trump wants to talk about fake news:
I spent the first two decades of my career as a social scientist studying liars and their lies. I thought I had developed a sense of what to expect from them. Then along came President Trump. His lies are both more frequent and more malicious than ordinary people’s....
Research on the detection of deception consistently documents this “truth bias.” In the typical study, participants observe people making statements and are asked to indicate, each time, whether they think the person is lying or telling the truth. Measuring whether people believe others should be difficult to do accurately, because simply asking the question disrupts the tendency to assume that other people are telling the truth. It gives participants a reason to wonder. And yet, in our statistical summary of more than 200 studies, Charles F. Bond Jr. and I found that participants still believed other people more often than they should have — 58 percent of the time in studies in which only half of the statements were truthful. People are biased toward believing others, even in studies in which they are told explicitly that only half of the statements they will be judging are truths.
By telling so many lies, and so many that are mean-spirited, Trump is violating some of the most fundamental norms of human social interaction and human decency. Many of the rest of us, in turn, have abandoned a norm of our own — we no longer give Trump the benefit of the doubt that we usually give so readily.
So, Trump wants to talk about fake news:
I spent part of my convalescence from a recent illness reading some of the comprehensive timelines of the Russia investigation (which indicates, I suppose, a sickness of another sort). One, compiled by Politico, runs to nearly 12,000 words — an almost book-length account of stupidity, cynicism, hubris and corruption at the highest levels of American politics.
The cumulative effect on the reader is a kind of nausea no pill can cure. Most recently, we learned about Donald Trump Jr.’s direct communications with WikiLeaks — which CIA Director Mike Pompeo has called “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia” — during its efforts to produce incriminating material on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election. But this is one sentence in an epic of corruption. There is the narrative of a campaign in which high-level operatives believed that Russian espionage could help secure the American presidency, and acted on that belief. There is the narrative of deception to conceal the nature and extent of Russian ties. And there is the narrative of a president attempting to prevent or shut down the investigation of those ties and soliciting others for help in that task.
In all of this, there is a spectacular accumulation of lies. Lies on disclosure forms. Lies at confirmation hearings. Lies on Twitter. Lies in the White House briefing room. Lies to the FBI. Self-protective lies by the attorney general. Blocking and tackling lies by Vice President Pence. This is, with a few exceptions, a group of people for whom truth, political honor, ethics and integrity mean nothing.
So, Trump wants to talk about fake news:
As the Princeton University philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt put it in a famous essay, to lie presumes a kind of awareness of and interest in the truth — and the goal is to convince the audience that the false thing you are saying is in fact true. Trump, more often than not, isn’t interested in convincing anyone of anything. He’s a bullshitter who simply doesn’t care.
In Trump's own book, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, our now-president describes himself in a way that Frankfurt could hold up as the quintessential example of a bullshitter. Trump writes that he’s an "I say what’s on my mind" kind of guy. Pages later, he explains that doesn’t mean he’s necessarily an honest guy.
"If you do things a little differently," he writes of the media, "if you say outrageous things and fight back, they love you." The free publicity that results from deliberately provoking controversy is invaluable. And if a bit of exaggeration is what it takes, Trump doesn’t have a problem with that. "When," he asks "was the last time you saw a sign hanging outside a pizzeria claiming ‘The fourth best pizza in the world’?!"
When Trump says something like he’s just learned that Barack Obama ordered his phones wiretapped, he’s not really trying to persuade people that this is true. It’s a test to see who around him will debase themselves to repeat it blindly. There’s no greater demonstration of devotion.
So, Trump wants to talk about fake news:
Trump has been nothing if not audacious in his charlatanry – truly (if that word can be used here) consummate as a liar. From the early days of Obama birth certificate humbug to the long and still growing 2017 playlist: his predecessor’s “wiretapping” of Trump Tower (microwaves included), an Electoral College victory bigger than any since Reagan, the contentions that no one cares about his tax returns or that the media ignores many acts of terrorism, his winning of the women’s vote, the recanting of the “locker room” dialogue with Billy Bush on the infamous Access Hollywood tape, ad infinitum: it has grown impossible to keep count as tweets and taunts flow from what we can now recognize as the White House font of fake news.
One source of Trump’s energy as a fabulist is his capacity to be a true believer, his inability to resist imbibing his own Koolaid. He is rarely bothered by the fact that facts can easily be checked – as in photographs of the inaugural crowd or the superior Electoral College performance of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.
Like the Queen of Hearts, the president has no problem believing at least six impossible things before breakfast (his prime tweeting time). His narcissistic yearning for recognition as the all-time alpha of the Oval Office is so extreme as to be pathological.
So, Trump wants to talk about fake news:
A decade ago, my lawyers questioned Trump under oath during a deposition in a libel case he filed against me for a biography I wrote, “TrumpNation.” (Trump lost the case in 2011.) Trump had to acknowledge 30 times during that deposition that he had lied over the years about a wide range of issues: his ownership stake in a large Manhattan real estate development; the cost of a membership to one of his golf clubs; the size of the Trump Organization; his wealth; the rate for his speaking appearances; how many condos he had sold; the debt he owed, and whether he borrowed money from his family to stave off personal bankruptcy.
Trump also lied during the deposition about his business relationships with organized crime figures.
So, Trump wants to talk about fake news:
For two straight days, they asked Trump question after question that touched on the same theme: Trump’s honesty.
The lawyers confronted the mogul with his past statements — and with his company’s internal documents, which often showed those statements had been incorrect or invented. The lawyers were relentless. Trump, the bigger-than-life mogul, was vulnerable — cornered, out-prepared and under oath.
Thirty times, they caught him….
That deposition — 170 transcribed pages — offers extraordinary insights into Trump’s relationship with the truth. Trump’s falsehoods were unstrategic — needless, highly specific, easy to disprove. When caught, Trump sometimes blamed others for the error or explained that the untrue thing really was true, in his mind, because he saw the situation more positively than others did.
One could almost say Trump has raised lying to an art form, except that there is nothing remotely artful about Trump. He’s not even good at artifice. He plays suckers for fools—and only fools are suckered.