September 17, 2020
Lies My Fuehrer Told Me
by John G. Russell

The President has never lied to the American public on COVID.

�White House spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany

It doesn�t bother me. I don�t feel like he was ever lying to anybody.

� North Dakota Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer

I�d be careful about using the word �lie.� �Lie� implies much more than
just saying something that�s false. It implies a deliberate intent to
mislead.� [W]hen Donald Trump says thousands of people were on the
rooftops of New Jersey on 9/11 celebrating, thousands of Muslims were
there celebrating, I think it�s right to investigate that claim, to report
what we found, which is that nobody found any evidence of that whatsoever,
and to say that. I think it�s then up to the reader to make up their own
mind to say, �This is what Donald Trump says. This is what a reliable,
trustworthy news organization reports. And you know what? I don�t think
that�s true.�

�Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerald Baker on how the media should
present Trump�s �falsehoods,� January 3, 2017

Donald John Trump is a murderous liar whose atrocities the American people
continue to abide. Finally, after months of silence, mainstream media
pundits and editorials are beginning sense the danger he poses to the
republic, as they question whether Trump will voluntarily leave the White
House if he is voted out of office, a necessary outcome if America is to
maintain the illusion that it is still a democracy. In order to set itself
on a trajectory toward social justice, the purge � and it must be a purge
� cannot stop with his ouster. We need to ask ourselves how our leaders �
political, �religious,� and journalistic � could continue to countenance
Trump, how white evangelicals could support a man whose moral compass
consistently points south to Hades, and how conservative pundits and
putative journalists could have repeated his lies and maintained their
silence about them while being fully aware that they were not only untrue
but obviously intended to deceive, even as hundreds of thousands of
Americans died. They must all be held accountable.

One might speculate as to why they tolerate Trump. Aside from their moral
bankruptcy, my first guess would be that Trump has something on them.
Recall that Trump�s late mentor and fixer was Roy Cohn, a mouthpiece for
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, a man who knew a thing or two about
leveraging dirt gathered on one�s political enemies. In his book Disloyal,
another Trump fixer, Michael Cohen, has written that in 2016 Trump had him
suppress �racy� photos of Jerry Falwell Jr to secure the support of the
now disgraced evangelical leader. No doubt, Trump has dirt on others that
he has mined to extort support for himself and protection against his
enemies and a potential post-election prison term. Trump�s personal
familiarity with the art of the smear may also explain why our Golden
(Shower) Boy kowtows to Putin. It may be less out of a fondness for
autocrats than hands on experience of the efficacy of extortion and the
human weaknesses that make it a tenable strategy for securing and
maintaining power.

Then again, the answer may be less complex. Trump�s enablers may simply be
unapologetic miscreants whose idolatry is not motivated by the threat of
exposure. Sometimes a scumbag is just a scumbag.

Regardless of what motivates these scoundrels, their lies take a toll,
which leads to another, far more disturbing question: Does it really
matter? Do we, to borrow Melania Trump�s inquiry, really care? Did we
ever? After all, while Trump�s college records, I.Q., and tax returns are
a well-kept secret, his mendacity is not. Our current awareness of his
proclivity for naked nihilism doesn�t arise from some epiphanous
revelation that the emperor has no clothes. When it comes to corruption
and maleficence, Trump has always been as transparent as those old
anatomical Visible Man model kits, though that which is exposed is not a
network of internal organs but a web of calculated deceits and feints. The
tawdry spectacle of his indiscretions was out there for all to see well
before he became president, and much more has come to light since. Indeed,
judging by the current spate in tell-all books about him, with more on the
way, Trump could probably use them to build his wall, should he be granted
another term.

An agitated Trump insists to a black female journalist that she is
misquoting him when she says that he promised a vaccine in by the end of
the year, only to add that it may come �before November,� hinting that it
might be ready �even before a very special date.� Video of Trump�s initial
statement reveals that the journalist did, in fact, accurately quote him.

He recommends ingesting bleach as a cure for COVID-19, only to deny it
later, claiming the remark was sarcasm.

He denies that he ever called John McCain �a loser� and boasts about how
much he loves his soldiers, or at least those who have not been captured,
maimed, missing in action or killed.

The fact that videos of Trump uttering these words exist and will now be
endlessly re-aired to highlight his mendacity does not faze him. We
already know Trump lies; we know he lies both badly and �bigly,� but never
with any consequences.

In short, Trump is a liar � and a bad one at that. But it doesn�t seem to
matter. Indeed, does the concept of a �bad liar� � both in its technical
and moral senses � mean anything anymore? �A lie told often enough,� the
propagandists insist, �becomes the truth,� but it does something far more
insidious: it inures us to dishonesty and undermines the very notion that
facts and reality matter.

This is not gaslighting; it is pure, poker-faced �A-Guide-to-the-Married-
Man� stonewalling. For at day�s end, like the flummoxed wife of that
film�s philandering husband, in the face of a cascade of interrogatory
evasions designed to obfuscate the reality of what we have seen and heard,
we simply give up and, discombobulated, meekly ask Trump what he wants for
dinner, or in the case at hand, if he wants another term.

How ironic it is, then, that even during the early days of the Trump
administration, the media debated whether it was journalistically
responsible to label Trump�s falsehoods �lies,� although eventually,
overwhelmed by their frequency, some outlets such as The Washington Post
began to count them (as of July 9, 20,055 and rising) and their columnists
and fact-checkers finally label them as such. Their initial dictum was
just to report what he said without speculating as to his intent and
present the reader/viewer with the facts. That in the eyes of Trump and
his supporters, the media was the �enemy of the people� and facts in the
age of information overload reduced to items on an a la carte menu from
which to be chosen depending on convenience and gut feelings had not yet
sunk in. Perhaps, like Trump himself, the media felt that calling out his
lies would cause the American people to panic, to lose faith in our system
of governance. One might have hoped they had learned from their mistakes:
After all, when Trump came into office, we were still reeling from the
after effects of seven years of war in Iraq started on the basis of
another series of lies largely unchallenged by the mainstream media.
(Tellingly, those who told the truth � Edwin Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and
Julian Assange � have become �enemies of the state.� More recent
whistleblowers, like Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, have been vilified by the
usual suspects.)

Or perhaps, like Bob Woodward, they decided to hold out until they saw the
bottom line and the prospect of higher circulation, steeper paywalls, and
larger ratings, which itself should be a source of rage.

Technology has not been of much help here. The panopticonic state with its
cellphones, television cameras, security cameras, and body cams and other
forms of mass surveillance has not provided, as Jeremy Bentham once
envisioned, a voyeuristic �mill for grinding rogues honest.� Instead, it
has produced new, more elaborate ways to evade, delay and potentially
conceal the truth.

Nor it is the problem merely that Trump�s lies; he also has others lie for
him. As The New Yorker�s Masha Geesen observed in 2018, �Lying for Trump
has become � a familiar practice in American politics.� The endless parade
of Trumpist prevaricators includes not only those who worked in his
administration � Ronny Jackson, Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, H.R.
McMaster, and John Kelly � and his stalwart Republican defenders � Mitch
McConnell, Mark Meadows, Matt Gaetz, and Jim Jordan � but also some
members of the Fourth Estate � Lou Dobbs, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, or
at least those hanging out in its infotainment gazebo. Politico reports
that Health and Human Services chairman Michael Caputo, and other top
officials, altered CDC reports on COVID-19 so that their findings better
squared with Trump�s lies, even going so far as to suggest victims of the
disease were to blame for contracting it, a telling emendation given that
the disease disproportionately afflicts people of color. Like a syphilitic
Midas, Typhoid Trump corrupts everything he touches, or, less generously,
freely indulges those actively seeking to wallow in their baser own
instincts. Nothing, including DHS, ICE, the CDC, the FDA and HHS, escapes
his poisonous embrace. To paraphrase Trump, �When you�re president they
let you do it. You can do anything.�