Presidential Lying.
All Presidents lie. That's a fact.
Most of it is innocuous--that's where the notion of spin comes in. Some of it is not.
However, the notion of a President who not only lies, but denies basic realities, is something completely without precedent.
While most Presidential lies have long gone forgotten, some have been preserved for the history books.
President Clinton famously lied. He lied about a personal affair. This was not at all an important lie in my opinion (certainly not one that required the impeachment proceedings that it brought), but, yes it was a lie and arguably the lowpoint of his otherwise successful presidency. However, disappointing as it might have been, it was a natural reaction. Extramarital affairs do happen, and the instinctive reaction for those caught in affair is to immediately deny it out of a sense of embarrassment or shame. It's a basic human instinct, regardless of whether one is the President or a postman.
The Bush administration lied. They lied about a rationale to go into war. And unlike President Clinton's little white lie, this was a deeply important and devastating lie to tell to the country. To this day, I remain convinced--and amble evidence supports my conviction--that the Bush administration was well aware that Saddam Hussein's arsenal of deadly weapons had long been destroyed, and yet it needed some reason to go into Iraq anyways. So it was a very bad lie in our nation's history, and one that had a destabilizing impact far beyond our own borders and into the Middle East. However, as terrible a lie as it was, there was always the remote, plausible (yet improbable) possibility that it could have been true. To wit, we know that at one point Saddam Hussein did in fact have chemical weapons in his possession (and had at one point made movements towards developing a nuclear weapon program). So there could have been the possibility that in Iraq there was some sort of hidden leftover stash of chemical weapons. I doubt it, and I think the Bush Administration doubted it, too. So it remains a grave lie on their part.
President Nixon lied. A lot. That goes without saying.
But while we've had Presidents who have lied--and again, even our most famous and celebrated Presidents (Lincoln, FDR, Obama) have crossed the line of truth at certain points--we've never had a President who has so little regard for the truth to as blatantly deny obvious realities.
Until now, with Donald Trump.
Yesterday, Donald Trump tweeted out,
Link to tweet
Donald J. TrumpVerified account @realDonaldTrump
Not that it matters but I never fired James Comey because of Russia! The Corrupt Mainstream Media loves to keep pushing that narrative, but they know it is not true!
5:11 AM - 31 May 2018
The problem for Trump was that a little over a year prior, on May 11, 2017, he sat down for an interview with NBC News anchor Lester Holt, who when questioned Trump about the firing of Director Comey, offered this to say:
That is Donald Trump's own words. Unedited. Unfiltered. No additional context needed.
He flat out says he was going to fire Comey regardless of any other recommendations because of "this Russia thing."
There's no he said/she said, no anonymous sources or hearsay accounts.
This is his own words, and it blatantly contradicts yesterday's tweet.
And America should know this. And America can know this, because it was broadcast all over TV, rebroadcast, posted on the internet, etc. It's everywhere.
The fact that a U.S. President can be so contemptuous of everything we all know and attempt to purport the total opposite of what we all know as true is absolutely terrifying.
I don't know why this is. Perhaps it's a sense of audacity and pride, the idea that the fact that he now denies it will rally his blind supporters to deny it as well, and thus create an alternate reality where he never said what he said to Lester Holt. Or maybe it's more pathological than that. I just don't know.
But this is completely uncharted territory for this country. And it bothered me all day yesterday and continues to bother me today, far worse than any shocking words of out a comedian's mouth will bother me.
When we lose a sense of truth, we lose absolutely everything.
It is a damn tragedy of the highest degree that someone of this low caliber and contempt for the truth is held up as our nation's leader.
This is not normal.
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