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.
- Trump said that President Barack Obama “did not want” to give surplus military equipment to the police, which was false. Trump claimed “tremendous support” in the Black community, which is particularly laughable.
- He took credit for the role of the National Guard in quelling disturbances in Minneapolis and Seattle, but local officials acted on their own in both cities.
- Trump claimed a record for coronavirus testing, but China has tested three times as many people as the United States, and this country lags behind several major countries in terms of tests per million people.
- He persists in the lie that President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden “spied” on his campaign, and that former campaign manager Paul Manafort was placed in “solitary confinement.” In actual fact, Manafort was in a “private, self-contained living unit” that had a bathroom, a shower, and telephone and laptop access.
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.
- In response to questioning, Barr stated that he didn’t have evidence that foreign countries can successfully sway our elections with counterfeit ballots, but he did have “common sense.” Barr denied that tear gas was used against peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square in June, but this denial was disputed by an Army National Guard Officer who was present during the protests. In congressional testimony, the officer stated that he found “spent tear gas canisters on the street nearby.”
- Barr argued that the Obama administration was responsible for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s failure regarding coronavirus testing. In fact, the CDC botched the development of its own tests, leaving the United States blind to the spread of the virus. The Trump administration has never put a federal policy in place, which is why the United States trails other nations in response to the virus.
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.