Illegitimate: Trump's Election and Failed Presidency by Harold J Breaux

Author:Harold J Breaux [Breaux, Harold J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780578783932
Goodreads: 55717000
Publisher: Harold J. Breaux
Published: 2020-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Trump’s Lies Are His Modus Operandi

6-1. Trump: Lying is a Daily Occurrence

The Trump presidency will go down in history as unparalleled concerning a daily litany of lies and mischaracterizations. Many of his lies were/are in making false claims about various aspects of his success in office or his alleged need to correct the ills he attributed to predecessors. Trump’s lies are so frequent, so repetitive, many of which deal with matters of great national import and presidential responsibilities, that tagging him with the term “Prevaricator in Chief” is appropriate.

Prevarication is a more formal way of saying some statement made is a “lie” and of substance in its misrepresentation. For example, Webster’s dictionary (1913 edition) definition of prevarication is “a secret abuse in the exercise of public office” is most appropriate for Trump because of the import of his lies on a sizable portion of the public and the public’s understanding of public policy issues.

Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post has kept an on-going tab of Trump’s false or misleading claims (lies) by giving “Pinocchios,” dependent on the degree of falsity. On April 14, 2020, after Trump had been in office 1,170 days, Kessler, Rizzo, and Kelly132 totaled the number at 18,000 false or misleading claims.

Leonhardt,133 of the New York Times, went beyond the mere lies to chronicle Trump’s actions (and inactions) in office under the title “Donald Trump versus the United States (just the facts in forty sentences).” Leonhardt begins the list of forty with “pressuring a foreign leader to interfere in the 2020 election” and ends with “he is the president of the United States, and he is a threat to virtually everything that the United States should stand for.”

Throughout his presidency, Trump has continued his pre-election penchant for lying, big and small, essentially seeking daily to conceal or deny any mishaps, conceal or avoid responsibility for actions that were in his purview, exaggerating and lying about his accomplishments—all to prop up his ego and chances for re-election continually. This chapter will chronicle his lies about “the greatest economy ever,” how China has paid the US for his tariffs and concealed the fact that funds for the payoff to farmers, necessitated by the tariffs, came from the US Treasury and not the Chinese.

Johnson134 describes Trump’s penchant for lying as a part of his then “business” persona—contained in Trump’s book— co-authored with Tony Schwarz titled The Art of the Deal, which was published in 1987.

It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion. The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole.

As an example of this hyperbole, Trump regularly laces his pronouncements, no matter how routine, with expressions such as greatest, outstanding, best, beautiful, time will tell.

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