| | | Trump and lying:
Ross Cohen
B.A. in History and Political Science
How can you tell if President Trump is lying?
It’s very tempting to make this into a joke, but I’m going to resist. It’s too easy.
On the plus side, he lies so often that we have a tremendous sample size from which to draw conclusions.
On the negative side, there are so, so many that no single rule of thumb could possibly cover them all.
That said, I’ve noticed that he seems to nearly always be lying any time he says, “Belieeve me.”
It’s similar to how you might notice that when certain truth-challenged people say something like “honestly,” before or after their statement, your internal lie detector should be blinking red because it’s a big tell.
For Mitt Romney, who was orders of magnitude more truthful than Trump, I always noticed his most blatant lies were his answers to questions that started with the phrase, “Of course,” especially when spoken emphatically, almost as an over-compensation for the utter falsehood that would follow.
For Trump, he lies with too much comfort and frequency for all of them to have a single tell, but phrases where he’s directly imploring the audience to buy whatever story he’s selling at the moment, typically with no basis or support offered, are some of the most highly correlated to his dishonesty. His other phrase I’m thinking of that fits this description is “Trust me.”
You shouldn’t.
With that said, Trump lies like no other. You’d seriously have a much higher success rate just assuming anything that leaves his mouth (or Twitter account) is a lie until proven true, than the other way around.
Newspapers tracking his lies found an unprecedented streak of daily lies for 40 straight days of his presidency—the first 40. The only reason the streak was broken was because he didn’t make any public statements on Day 41. If they had done the same exercise during the campaign I strongly suspect the count would be in triple digits.
During the campaign fact checkers rating hundreds of his statements found that about 3 out of every 4 were lies, a staggering number of which were so egregious they would get the worst possible rating, with colorful descriptions like “pants on fire.” All politicians lie sometimes, but no other comes even close to that level of mendacity, in either party.
People try to explain this away by suggesting he should be taken “seriously, but not literally.” I suppose that’s well and good for a promise to build a 2000 mile, 20 foot tall wall and get another country to pay for it, something that will never in a million years happen but sort of just puts a marker down and gives people a sense of where he stands, but it doesn’t work for much else. Most of those other direct statements are not just figurative, aspirational markers he’s putting down but actual, provably false statements.
I’ve lost interest in talking about how much of a liar he is, at this point you either get it or you don’t: he lies effortlessly, daily, about everything, big and small. Yet he’s surprisingly not very good at it and gets caught on nearly all of them. But it got him this far, so why stop? He couldn’t if he wanted to, but that’s another story.
I could give you links to cumulative lists of his lies:
NY Times: President Trump’s Lies, the Definitive List
Washington Post: Analysis | President Trump’s first 100 days: The fact check tally
WaPo again: Analysis | President Trump’s first six months: The fact-check tally
WaPo again: Analysis | President Trump’s list of false and misleading claims tops 1,000
WaPo’s interactive lie tracker: 365 days of Trump’s claims
Politifact: Donald Trump's file
Factcheck.org: 100 Days of Whoppers - FactCheck.org
[Updated WaPo tally: President Trump has made 1,318 false or misleading claims over 263 days]
Or you could just look at the news during any week of his campaign or presidency and find whatever he lied about that day.
As much as I hate the lies, I do get rather tickled by him getting called on it right in the moment, on the news chyron, the little boxes at the bottom of the screen where they write the “breaking news” of the moment.
The point is, you really don’t need a “how can you tell guide” for him. It’s practically Every. Single. Sentence.
Save yourself the headache and start from that assumption, you won’t often be wrong. |
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