Conventional Lies and Lies at the Convention
By Melvin A. Goodman, 
Trump’s war on America reminds us of Jonathan Swift’s saying “A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Thomas Jefferson’s version was “Falsehood will travel over the country, while truth is putting on its boots.” Mark Twain said something similar, and so did Winston Churchill. There is a Chinese proverb (“Error will travel over half the globe, while truth is putting on its boots.”), as well. Well, Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr are doing their best to test the validity of these proverbs.
The Fact Checker of the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler, said that it took Trump 827 days to top 10,000 false and misleading statements, an average of 12 lies a day. But it took Trump about half that time to pass the 20,000 mark, an average of 23 lies a day. The pandemic and the Republican Convention are spawning a new round of deceit; the pace of various lies and claims is fast and furious.
Trump’s Interview with Sean Hannity
In an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity in July, Trump racked up 30 false statements.
Attorney General Barr Testifying on Capitol Hill
William Barr, who serves as Trump’s Roy Cohn (“Communist”-hunter Senator Joe McCarthy’s chief legal counsel), performs as Trump’s wingman in this campaign season, using congressional testimony to corroborate Trump’s lies.
Trump’s Acolytes at the RNC
It’s almost impossible to track the falsehoods and flat-out lies at the Republican Convention due to the participation of so many members of the Trump family, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow.
Eric Trump echoed his father and accused Joe Biden with a pledge to “defund the police,” which is flat-out wrong. Eric Trump also credited his father with “Promises made and promises, for the first time, were kept.” The Post Fact Checker Kessler tracked the campaign promises, particularly the 60 promises that were in writing, and found that 21 were kept, 26 were broken, and seven were compromises.
Secretary Pompeo, in violation of the Hatch Act for addressing the convention from Jerusalem of all places, credited Trump with getting North Korea to stop nuclear testing, including long-range tests. Not long ago, U.S. Air Force General John Hyten stated that North Korea was “building new missiles, new capabilities, new weapons as fast as anybody on the planet with the 115th-most powerful economy in the world.” Pompeo also credited Trump with getting Kim Jong Un to return “precious remains of scores of our heroes who fought in Korea.” In fact, some remains were returned after the first Trump-Kim Jong Un summit in 2018, but soon after Pyongyang ended the coordination of joint recovery operations.
Kudlow stated that Trump inherited a “stagnant economy on the front end of a recession.” In fact, Trump inherited a strong economy that was adding hundreds of thousands of job a month from 2014 to 2016. Trump claims that he created an “economic turnaround of historic proportions,” when in fact the United States was adding jobs for nearly six years.
Trump’s Insatiable Urge to Lie
Trump’s narcissism demands that he must be right about all events and issues that relate to him, which his ridiculous praise for his handling of the pandemic demonstrates. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris represent a different kind of challenge that is leading him from one rage to another. Trump is not capable of a thoughtful and reasoned response; falsehoods, misleading claims, and flat-out lies come much too easily to him.