Trump Continues To Lie, The Truth Continues To Die
President Trump has told an astonishingly large number of lies since taking office.
The Washington Post’s fact checkers are back with one of their periodic updates on the President’s veracity or lack thereof, and the numbers are pretty surprising even for this President:
In the 466 days since he took the oath of office, President Trump has made 3,001 false or misleading claims, according to The Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president.
That’s an average of nearly 6.5 claims a day.
When we first started this project for the president’s first 100 days, he averaged 4.9 claims a day. Slowly, the average number of claims has been creeping up.
Indeed, since we last updated this tally two months ago, the president has averaged about 9 claims a day.
Our interactive graphic, created with the help of Leslie Shapiro and Kaeti Hinck of The Washington Post’s graphics department, displays a running list of every false or misleading statement made by Trump. We also catalogued the president’s many flip-flops, since those earn Upside-Down Pinocchios if a politician shifts position on an issue without acknowledging that he or she did so.
Trump has a proclivity to repeat, over and over, many of his false or misleading statements. We’ve counted at least 113 claims that the president has repeated at least three times, some with breathtaking frequency.
Seventy-two times, the president has falsely claimed he passed the biggest tax cut in history — when in fact it ranks in eighth place. Fifty-three times, the president has made some variation of the claim that the Russia probe is a made-up controversy. (If you include other claims about the Russia probe that are not accurate, the count goes to 90.) Forty-one times, the president has offered a variation of the false claim that Democrats do not really care about the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that Trump terminated.
Thirty-four times, the president has wrongly asserted that a border wall was needed to stop the flow of drugs across the southern border, even though the Drug Enforcement Administration says a wall would not limit this illegal trade, as much of it travels through legal borders or under tunnels unaffected by any possible physical barrier.
Thirteen times in the past five weeks, Trump has claimed his long-promised border wall is already being built, even though Congress denied him the funding and prohibited the use of prototypes he had viewed with great fanfare.
Of course, not every day is filled with falsehoods, but the president makes up for his slow days with days that offer an extraordinary number of misleading claims — such as 53 on July 25, 2017, or 49 on Nov. 29, 2017. These are often days when the president has had a series of freewheeling interviews or given a campaign-rally-style speech.
For example, only days ago, on April 28, Trump racked up 44 claims, many of which came from the president’s 80-minute speech in Michigan.
Looking at the numbers, it gets even worse. As of today, President Trump has been in office for 469 days. Based on the Post’s numbers, this makes for an average of 6.4 false or misleading statements per day. This would bring him to roughly 9,492 such statements at the end of his first term and 18,765 false or misleading statements at the end of a hypothetical second term. Even conceding the argument that some of the “false or misleading” statements that the Post has cataloged are judgment calls, this is an extraordinary number that likely far surpasses anything that we’ve seen from any of Trump’s predecessors.
According to a new poll, the vast majority of the American public has come to expect this from the President:
A majority of Americans think that President Trump either rarely or never tells the truth, according to an NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll released Wednesday.
Overall, 61 percent of respondents to the online poll believe that Trump tells the truth “only some of the time or less.”
The survey results came a day after The Washington Post’s Fact Checker reported that Trump has made more than 3,000 false or misleading statements since taking office last year.
Perceptions of the president’s honesty are largely divided along party lines.
According to the NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll, 94 percent of Democrats and 76 percent of independents believe that Trump tells the truth only occasionally or even less frequently.
Republicans, on the other hand, overwhelmingly view Trump as a consistent truth-teller. Seventy-six percent said that he tells the truth either all or most of the time, while 22 percent believe that he tells the truth only some of the time or less.
Among that 22 percent, more than half approve of Trump’s job in the Oval Office, the poll found.
The survey overall pegged Trump’s approval rating at 45 percent. By comparison, 53 percent of respondents disapprove of the job Trump is doing.
The party division regarding the President’s truthfulness isn’t surprising. As we’ve seen from other polling, the vast majority of Republicans approve of the job the President is doing while the same overwhelming majority of Democrats disapprove. Among independents, the majority of whom believe the President lies on a regular basis, the number of people who disapprove of the President’s job performance is slightly higher than it is among the general population. Taking these numbers into account, the fact that Republicans believe that the President generally tells the truth isn’t surprising given the fact that they think he’s doing a good job. What’s is somewhat surprising is that at least some segment of the people who believe the President is basically a congenital liar also approve of the job he’s doing. There’s a disconnect there that doesn’t entirely make sense.
Taking into account the extent to which the President clearly makes things up, whether it’s during one of his campaign-style rallies, during an interview, or on Twitter, it’s not at all surprising that he has fared so badly with the fact-checkers. From the start of his campaign, he’s made false and easily disproven claims about Mexicans and crime, about immigrants in general, about Muslims, and about policy issues ranging from international trade to foreign policy to history, there are few politicians who have been quite as skilled as Donald Trump when it comes to being able to lie so easily and so frequently and make it seem as though he believes what he’s saying, or that he simply doesn’t care if it’s true or not. This is a skill he honed during the time he was considered a “celebrity” prior to the time he became a candidate for President when his brash, obviously exaggerated claims about his own business success would be slavishly repeated by the media rather investigated to see if they were actually true. If Trump learned from that experience is that it largely did not matter if the claims he were true or not. For the most part, the people reporting the “news” about Trump back then were not inclined to check just how much of what he said was true. Indeed, given the fact that it was his status as an ostentatious celebrity that caused the public to tune in or buy newspapers and magazines when they covered him, it was not in their interest to deflate him, but rather to build him up since the relationship between celebrities and the media that covers them is largely a symbiotic one where the media benefits by inflating the ego of the celebrity, and the celebrity benefits by letting the media cover him or her.
From these years, Trump no doubt learned the lesson that making things up didn’t really matter because the media wasn’t going to check anyway, and he has carried that lesson over to his political career. Things are a bit different when it comes to political reporters, of course, but the fact that Trump was, from the beginning such a high ratings draw for all the cable news outlets means that they were much less inclined to challenge his factual assertions lest he decide to issue one of the several “boycotts” that he’s engaged in over the course of the campaign. Those media outlets that have challenged him on the facts, such as The Des Moines Register, The Washington Post, and even Fox News Channel have found themselves subjected to one of Trump’s mercurial reprisal efforts.
All that being said, Trump’s liberties with the truth, even when pointed out by the media, have not had much of an impact on his political fortunes. His die-hard supporters, quite obviously, don’t care about something as apparently trivial as the fact that the candidate they support is a proven liar, for example, and neither do the Republicans who have rallied behind him in the wake of his clinching of the nomination. Now, as we approach his first year and a half in office, all we can be sure of is that the lying will continue and his supporters will continue to not give a damn.
That WAPO count doesn’t include obvious BS like having secret dirt on John Tester.
I occasionally watch cable news panels that include Republican political hacks who defend the bluster of the day, but the stupidity starts boring into my head and I have to change the channel.
I think perhaps one could reconcile the number of people who both believe he lies and approve of him with the phrase “Ignorance is Strength.”
A cogent Twitter take from Brian Beutler:
“The correct answer to this is that the White House lies constantly, reporters demand to know each time how the White House is to be trusted, and then the process repeats without any modification, so there’s no disincentive to lie.”
@Kathy: I was thinking about that, and the only thing I can conclude is that they view it as a form of “sticking it to the libs.” That is, he isn’t lying to them, he’s lying to the pencil necks in the media and us. He isn’t lying to them, he’s lying for them and for that he’s a true conservative hero. Have you seen the fan art? It’s nuts.
Rush always says Trump has all of us geeks wrapped around his little finger and he’s chuckling away at how he gets us to flinch every time he tweaks us. That’s what they think. They don’t care about anything else.
From what I can see over at Lucianne.com, where anyone who criticizes Trump gets banned, the commenters simply don’t believe that Trump lies. No, it’s the Fake Media making stuff up about him. The Fake Media includes everything but The Gateway Pundit, Taki’s Magazine, DC Whispers, Breitbart, and a few other lesser-known crackpot blogs written by semi-literate paranoid hysterics. The Conservative Treehouse, which was once revered there, was recently cast into outer darkness. I have no idea why. The proprietor still appears to be drooling over Trump.
@Steve V:
I noticed something like that myself in 2016, when he was still just a candidate. I wrote a post about it. A lot of his supporters would simply claim he wasn’t telling the truth whenever he said things they didn’t approve of, but he was telling the truth about the things they cared about. Limbaugh actually described him as playing a brilliant game due to his years supporting the Clintons and other Democrats.
All demagogues give the people an enemy that explains their woes. Germany in the 30’s was starving from the reparations they were paying due to WW1. It also had a long history of antisemitism. So Hitler blamed their misery on the Jew bankers and vowed to fight for the good white folk and they let him get away with murder.
America has a long history of racism and anti intellectualism and trump tells the poor whites that the browns, and the chinese are stealing their jobs and drugging their kids, and the sneering coastal elites only care about the feminist lesbians and transgenders in the bathroom.
If trump wasn’t lazy and incompetent I’d be pretty worried.
Ben Garrison’s stuff is absolute lunacy. and he doesn’t make points so much as pummel you over the head with them.
@teve tory:
LOL, that guy is 100% baked …
@CSK:
I think those people are lying themselves. I simply do not believe that they actually believe Trump. They want to, and they have race-loyalty to him, but they know he’s lying. These same people will go on lying long after Trump is exposed and run out of town. They aren’t capable of facing the truth.
@michael reynolds: A lot of people will double down supporting a fraud even after it’s obvious to the outside disinterested eye that the fraud is a fraud.
Well, I guess SOMEBODY out there has to be answering all the Nigerian spam that sloshes around….
(That’s my definition of intelligent–not IQ, but whether you have the guts to admit that you are wrong.)
So, after the Rudy news and the Cohen/wiretap news, what’s the over and under on Dennison firing Rosenstein and Mueller?
@michael reynolds:
You may well be right. That is probably the case with many of them. Still, the squealing rapture with which they greet any stupid babble that emerges from that facial anus he calls a mouth and any witless gabble he posts on Twitter makes me wonder. They were bad enough when they were having orgasms over Sarah Palin. It’s as if, having been deprived of her, they’ve tripled down on the hero worship.
@Steve V:
That strikes me more as Churchill’s quip that truth is so valuable in war, that she needs a bodyguard of lies.
But I don’t think that’s what trump’s doing, and all his supporters know about Churchill is that World War Two.
@Steve V:
That’s why I don’t watch CNN, too much lying by Republican hacks. (I assume this is motivated by a bothsiderist impulse). There is much less outright lying by the Republicans on the MSNBC panels.
@michael reynolds:
They actually do believe. It’s remarkable where motivated reasoning and confirmation bias can take people.
@Kylopod:
The bond between Limbaugh and Trump amuses me, since Limbaugh appears to have tossed aside every principle he ever claimed to hold (character counts!) to support Trump, but it makes sense. They’re two fat, ugly, rich, loudmouthed con artist entertainers with multiple younger trophy wives who live in Florida and play golf.
Another Trump building decides to take the name off
@grumpy realist:
At this point, I think their property values would increase if they decided to rename it Osama bin Laden Place or Hitler Place.
@CSK: It’s even more curious because in the 1990s Limbaugh launched a crusade against Pat Buchanan, calling him a fake conservative in large part because of his critiques of NAFTA. It’s funny in retrospect because Buchanan’s basic ideology–though not his personality–was essentially Trumpism before Trump. It was a form of right-wing America First nationalism that blamed the country’s economic problems on competition from nonwhite foreigners resulting from free trade and open borders.
Two decades later, and Limbaugh was gushing over Trump from practically the moment he stepped into the presidential race. What happened? Well, for one thing, his attacks on Buchanan in the 1990s provoked a backlash from many of his listeners at the time, so it’s possible Limbaugh decided that going against Trump would risk alienating a large segment of his audience. More importantly, I think Limbaugh recognized that he and Trump were cut from the same cloth–and I’m not just talking about their both being loud obnoxious fatsos with trophy wives. Limbaugh in a fundamental way was one of the creators of the modern right-wing infotainment complex. Long before Trump, before even Fox News, he was there blathering on talk radio for hours with his racist and sexist jokes, making fun of people’s appearance, giving people he didn’t like funny names, promoting conspiracy theories about the Clintons and others. The entire right-wing culture we see today–with its media trolling, its schoolyard-level taunts, its attempt to reduce liberals to the punchline of a joke, and its promotion of alternative facts while simultaneously trying to delegitimize mainstream sources of information–is something that can pretty much be traced back to Limbaugh. I don’t know if he was the first to resort to these antics, but he was definitely the first to become popular through them. So when Trump popped up in 2015 as a prospective GOP candidate, Limbaugh saw in him a fellow traveler in a way that he never did with Buchanan.
I see it as partly religious. I believe what my tribe believes. Long ago in a Confirmation class I declared I believed what my synod believed. So did the rest of the congregation. I no longer have any recollection of the details of what I once believed. Neither do the rest of them, but they still “believe” it. Believe is an odd word. There is a wide range of meaning from I believe the body and blood of Christ is “”in, with and under” the bread and wine” and I believe if I walk out my back door I’ll be on my deck.
There’s also a large element of George Lakoff’s observation that conservatives are able to think in terms of cause and effect, but they don’t. They think in terms of simple morality. That’s why Trump can brag about low Black unemployment. To most of us it’s obvious that’s the result of Obama’s recovery. To believers it is a reward for having been virtuous by electing Trump, like their pastors told them to. They’re good with cum hoc ergo propter hoc.
There’s also, with that, an element of confusion. They believe Trump lies. They also believe that the MSM lies, that the government lies, that politicians all lie, and that Hillary lied most of all. This is hard to fight in that the MSM, the government, and all politicians including Hillary do lie. I became politically aware during Vietnam, when the government lied every day about everything. They know they’re being lied to and lack the sophistication to distinguish between say, NYT lying about Iraq because Judith Miller was sweetening the Cheney beat, and Republicans lying about tax cuts reducing the deficit (a reward for being virtuous by cutting taxes). So they know they’re surrounded by lies and don’t distinguish Trump’s from everybody else’s.
(Sometimes these comments are little essays to clarify my own thinking. Thanks for bearing with me.)
@Kylopod:
Oh, absolutely. Right-wing talk radio hosts may not have any convictions or principles of their own, but they’re absolutely first-rate at sussing out and providing their audiences what that audience wants. Limbaugh is the best at this. I recall when he was hot for Sarah Palin, and then, when it became pitifully obvious that Palin was destined for nothing greater than presiding haphazardly over a clan of dimwitted drunks and druggies with an astounding capacity for getting arrested and spawning children out of wedlock, Trump happened along. Providentially, the same crew of suckers who willingly hopped aboard the Palin Express to Nowhere willingly disembarked and leapt onto the Trump Train.
Slightly OT, but if John Kelly gets replaced, it’s going to be by Corey Lewandowsky. Giuliani had dinner with Lewandowsky before he went on Fox last night, and Lewandowsky accompanied Trump to Michigan, where Trump introduced him to the crowd.
It will be interesting to see how Ivanka reacts, given that she told her father back in 2016 that he had a choice between her and Corey.
@CSK: A while back I read an article comparing right-wing culture to fanboy culture, because of their similar obsession in distinguishing between “true” fans and fake ones–who’s a true Star Trek fan, a true Mets fan, a true metalhead, and so on. It’s always the “true fans” who get to make the call as to who’s a true fan, and they end up constructing scores of shibboleths that are only perceptible to members-in-good-standing.
In 2008 Limbaugh attacked John McCain and Mike Huckabee as fake conservatives and then praised Mitt Romney as the one candidate who embodied “the three legs of the conservative stool”–mostly ignoring Romney’s relatively moderate record as MA governor. Four years later he was attacking Romney as a fake conservative, not because Romney had changed in that time (if anything he’d moved even more to the right) but because Limbaugh had changed the criteria. (Namely, signing universal health care in MA didn’t become a heresy until a similar policy was signed by the Kenyan socialist.) But as far as I’m aware Limbaugh never praised Romney for playing a brilliant long game in having once adopted relatively liberal positions, the way he would go on to praise Trump for just that.
The difference, I suppose, is that Romney exudes inauthenticity. Of course, it’s hard to think of a political figure less authentic than Donald Trump, whose entire public career is built on lies and fraud, who can barely open his mouth without making demonstrably false statements. But here’s where we get to the difference between real authenticity and the conservative fanboy understanding of the concept. Romney is someone who always seems like he’s trying too hard, whereas Trump never seems to be exerting any effort at all. It’s like that line from The Princess Bride, “You’re trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen.” Trump lies and lies and lies, but he does it in such an I-don’t-give-a-f*ck manner that a lot of people reach the conclusion that at least he’s being himself and not trying to pass himself off as someone he’s not. That’s a dangerously false impression, but it fools a lot of people, even those who realize he’s making demonstrably untrue statements.
@gVOR08:
No need to apologize, I enjoyed it. I think you’ve summarized it nicely.
I’ve always tried to severely limit the number of things I believe in, because those choices should be carefully made, and because they must (in my cosmology) be defensible. I can’t say I believe something unless I can also explain why I believe it – either on the basis of evidence or as an a priori assumption I choose to make in the absence of evidence. But even then, whatever you’ve decided on as your foundational world view that, still has to be subject to re-examination. That’s your operating system, you need to download the updates.
Most people prefer, and I suppose need, a great deal more solidity than my shifting, conditional approach. I suspect most people essentially turn off critical thinking just as soon as they can and never open that box again, using their brains almost exclusively for quotidian problem-solving.
@grumpy realist: The Nigerian scam analogy is a good one. I once heard someone who researched such scams speculate as to why they never improved. Since they are basically cut and paste jobs, after all these years, why were they still filled with misspellings and awkward sentences? Their conclusion was that it was a feature not a bug. In order to keep their return rate high they needed to make sure the people who responded were awesomely stupid, venal and gullible. I.e. Fox News.
@Kylopod:
And bear in mind that Trump is considered authentic precisely because he’s a boob and an oaf. It’s a common observation–I’ve made it myself here several times–that there’s always been a vein of anti-intellectualism in American popular culture. What’s become apparent since the rise of Sarah Palin and The Triumph of Trump is that a considerable number of Americans regard gentility and refinement as un-American as well. Trump’s a crude swine whose behavior would embarrass the other occupants of the pigsty. But hey! That means he’s a patriot!
@Charon:
People say they believe they’ll go to heaven when they die and live a life infinitely better than this life. This life which, when push comes to shove, they cling to with the fanatical intensity common to all humans. People say they believe in an omniscient God yet defy his commandments regularly. Compare that to people’s belief in the solidity of brick walls. People will defy God, they’ll never try to walk through a brick wall. They say they believe in God, the really believe in brick walls. There’s aspirational belief and real belief and they are two very different things.
Strip money and politics away and Trump is just this average chump who aspires to live up to his own BS. It’s the old saying–if you run into an asshole once a day, you ran into an asshole, but if you run into assholes everywhere you’re the asshole. Having been an asshole, that seems to me to be quite true. But Trump and his people are the type who can’t admit anything. They’re Replicants when confronted with actual human behavior. They don’t understand people, which is totally cool. Few do. But they also are control freaks, and that’s why they’re creeping closer and closer to these incel idiots by the day.
@michael reynolds:
I think you’re correct that they don’t believe him. For most of them its no more a matter of truth than its a matter of truth when a player on your favorite team gets called with a penalty; fans automatically take their player’s side, even when they know the call was fair. Its about cheering on the team rather than truth.
Which makes me wonder if there was ever a time when the ‘team’ was the nation and not the party? Right now, outside of the 5% of the population (about 10 million voters) who follow politics on one side or another and make up most of the rallies and internet discussion, most voters don’t care (or even know) what the leader of their team has said or done, they just vote the way they always vote (the stats are very clear on this, only a few percentage ever change their vote). And the more people you talk to the more you realize most Trump voters don’t know a single thing Trump said during or since the election: for them its as irrelevant as knowing what the quarterback of their favorite team has said. A minute listening to politicians is seen as a wasted minute; you vote who you always vote for the thinking goes, so why bother listening to boring stuff?
If only there was some way of people to identify with the country and not the party. It would radically change the way politics is done.
@gVOR08:
This is an important point. If you are sophisticated enough to recognize that all of the major information sources are unreliable — and they are — but you are not sophisticated enough to be able to distinguish for yourself when information is misleading or false, then who you listen to will be determined by other factors. Factors like what you would like to believe is true, and who is made unhappy/uncomfortable by the statement etc.
It all comes down to education. If the people aren’t competent to distinguish truth from lies, the prettiest lies will win elections.
But guys, guys, don’t you remember when Obama said you could keep your insurance?
Americans are used to it. There was an 8 year lie that Obama was fit to lead and many bought into that one too. Then there are Hillary’s lies about…oh well, why bother.
@John430:
What’s truly pathetic is that I could do a far better job of coming up with Obama lies than you have here. The claim that Obama was fit to lead is not a lie. It by definition cannot possibly be a lie, since it’s a matter of opinion, not fact.
I do actually agree that Americans are used to politicians lying, but if you believe that started with Obama, you’re seriously naive.
In any case, here’s how Politifact breaks down Trump’s record of statements vs. Obama’s:
Obama: 21% True, 28% Mostly True, 27% Half True, 12% Mostly False, 12% False, 2% Pants on Fire
Trump: 5% True, 11% Mostly True, 16% Half True, 22% Mostly False, 32% False, 15% Pants on Fire
Or, to put it more simply, 26%–just a little over a quarter–of the examined Obama statements are all or mostly false, whereas 69%–more than two-thirds–of Trump’s are.
In short, comparing Obama lies to Trump lies is like comparing a guy who gets a speeding ticket to a serial killer, on the grounds that they both violated the law.
Really? We’re calling this a Lie now?
“Democrats do not really care about the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program”
I mean sure, the Dems care about DACA as a political issue, but they sure don’t care about the actual DACA recipients. Calling that a lie tho is just partisan hackery.
This is why I can’t take all this Trump Is The Worst Liar Ever crud seriously.
When Trump says you can keep you doctor, or that he’s had a scandal free administration, or promises peace in our time with a new NK deal, then maybe we can talk.
Side note: Politifact (sic) recently said Cruz’s claim that O’Rourke wants to legalize narcotics is False, when they rated that claim as Half True when a Democrat said it.
Why anyone relys on these “Fact Check” sites is just beyond me. (Unless of course, you just like your Echo Chamber.)
Politifact has even been caught in outright lies themselves.
@TM01:
Semantically, you just contradicted yourself and admitted this was a lie. But I’m in general agreement that giving an opinion about somebody else’s opinion cannot really be a fact that is judged true or false.
Trump has more than enough factual lies that I’m not worried about you cutting this one.
@TM01:
What you’re responding to is the article’s clumsily worded summary of the WaPo’s previous fact-check of an undeniably false series of statements by Trump, particularly an Apr. 2 tweet in which he falsely claimed that “DACA is dead because the Democrats didn’t care or act.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/04/03/a-guide-to-president-trumps-latest-round-of-fact-challenged-tweets
Unfortunately, the more recent WaPo article focused on that word “care,” the least relevant part of Trump’s claim. Speculating about how much people care is beyond the purview of fact checkers. What is relevant is that he’s blaming Democrats for the demise of a program that he ended, and which Democrats offered Trump $25 billion in border-wall funding to restore.
I had to look this one up. It wasn’t hard, since Politifact mentions upfront, in their article on Cruz, that they previously gave a Half True to a former Democratic rival of O’Rourke’s making a similar claim. The reason for the discrepancy is fairly obvious, if you examine the different quotes. The background is that O’Rourke not only has long advocated the legalization of marijuana, but he once, as a city council official, backed a resolution calling for an “honest national debate” on ending drug prohibition, though he concurrently told reporters he didn’t favor such a policy.
So why did Politifact give Ted Cruz a false, and the other guy a Half True? Because O’Rourke’s earlier, Democratic rival merely said that O’Rourke “wants to legalize drugs.” That was misleading, but the phrasing is ambiguous enough that there’s some plausible deniability. I’d have given it Mostly False, but that’s a judgment call. However, there is no ambiguity whatsoever in what Cruz said. Cruz’s tweet went: “With opioids ravaging so many American communities, Congressman Beto O’Rourke’s radical resolution to legalize all narcotics–including heroin and other deadly opioids–is looking worse and worse all the time.” Here, Cruz not only uses the word “all,” but specifically references hard drugs that O’Rourke has allegedly sought to legalize. There’s no way to spin Cruz’s claim or give it plausible deniability; it’s just flat-out false.
It’s worth noting that the Obama claim you’re alluding to (the actual line was “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it”) was not ignored by the fact checkers. In fact, Politifact awarded it “Lie of the Year”–despite the fact that the vast majority of people have been able to keep their health care plan. Still, it’s a fair criticism since Obama’s statement implied universality.
Now, contrast that with Trump’s repeated statements that the Obamacare repeal bills would give everyone excellent health care for less money, or that the tax bill was the biggest tax cut in history. Those are far more massive distortions than what Obama said about the Affordable Care Act, but they didn’t earn Politifact’s Lie of the Year award (the actual one from 2017 was the claim that Russian interference in the 2016 election was a “made-up story”)–not because PF was ignoring them, but because Trump lies so much and so often that those two lies are utterly routine for him.
It isn’t news that politicians lie. The story here is the unprecedented scale of the lies.
@Kylopod: You are fighting the good fight, but I’m sure you are aware that truth, facts and reality are not going to have any effect on Trumpoids. The modern Republican Party is quite literally the Party of Lies.
@MarkedMan:
The fun part is that all they’re accomplishing here is essentially shouting “our guy sucks just as much a yours did”.
Even if it’s accurate (which it isn’t, but …), it can never be anything more than a Pyrrhic victory, at best.
But they should keep trying to deflect acknowledging that Trump is an unmitigated disaster by whining about the failures of Democrats. Their contention was that Republicans were somehow supposed to be better, but all they have to offer is apparently why, in their opinion, Republicans equally suck. Speaking frankly, it’s amusing to watch.
@george:
The sports team analogy is exactly on-point. As for us all being Team America, that’s certainly how I’ve personally seen it. But against that, take WW2, our most threatening war, a war in which we were all supposed to be united against genuinely evil foes. White defense workers still went on strike because dockyards were starting to give equal pay to black workers. In the middle of a war they refused to build vital weapons because: racism. It was still Team White vs. Team Other despite our being in a death match with the ultimate racist power.
Trump told the press that Giuliani is a great guy who’s just started working for him, and “he’ll get his facts straight.”
Trump also said that he’d love to talk to Mueller.
This ought to be a barrel of laughs.
@michael reynolds:
Mmhmm, right in my hometown of Baltimore. 6,000 white shipyard workers walked out because the company had the temerity to hire a relatively tiny number of qualified African-American riveters.
One African-American woman – one – being assigned to an inspection department at Western Electric in Point Breeze eventually resulted in the complete shutdown of five whole plants and Roosevelt sending in the Army to take control.
It has always been about Team White vs. Team Other, and IMO it still is. The root cause of all of this Republican base garbage is the fear inherent in the erosion of white hegemony. Window dressing for bigotry, if you will.
Trump said he’d be willing to override his lawyers’ insistence that he not speak to Mueller.
Seriously? Has Emmet Flood found the exit yet?
@CSK:
Like anything he says means anything…
@Steve V: Trump’s supporters see themselves in the middle of a tribal war. And what’s the first casualty of war? The Truth!
@michael reynolds: Note to mention locking up American citizens because… Japanese names and faces.
@CSK:
If Trump wants to aim a howitzer at his head and threatens to pull the lanyard, one ought to respect his choices and be supportive.
Breaking: Rudy is going to be issuing corrections to his previous statements (maybe by the time this comment gets out of the moderation qeue).
Michael Avenatti must be loving this shit show.
I have some serioulsy uneducated kentucky relatives. Like dropped-out-of-middle-school-to-work-on-the-farm uneducated. And they fall for every snake oil miracle health cure they see on the internet or hear on wacko radio. All the time they’re buying AdrenaSense pills, Silver Colloid Solution, room ozonators, alkalinized water, Therapeutic Living Clay, Liquid Minerals, you name it. And it used to really piss me off. There was nothing I could say to change their mind.
I calmed down when I realized they weren’t stupid, they just had not 5% of the education they’d need to take one look at the stuff and call bullshit. When you literally don’t know what a molecule is, or what pH means, or why the people at Harvard Medical School know better than Doctor Ben’s Liver Pills Inc., you really couldn’t do better than just guessing. And snake oil salesman know how to make you guess their way.
WV Senate Candidate Attacks McConnell’s ‘China Family’ In New Ad
But Democrats are the Real Racists because (some shit that happened before my graddad was born)
@michael reynolds:
That’s a good (and sad) example – not even a war for survival like WW2 was enough to overcome things like racism – or greed, according to books like “Trading with the Enemy” which describe how huge corporations were happy to sell vitally needed supplies to the Axis powers.
@HarvardLaw92:
There’s a huge element of racism, but its not all racism. There are non-white people who vote GOP (I know several), and the whole idea of self-hating black or native American is patronizing garbage; individuals are complex enough to vote for someone who is racist against their people if they think they get some personal advantage out of it.
I think the most basic theme underlying the modern Republican party is greed – “I got mine, Jack” is their motto. People will even accept colored folk if there’s enough profit in it – look at all the racist sports team owners who are happy to pay colored athletes many millions so long as they contribute to their personal profit.
@george: George, you make this claim over and over again about only 5% of people following politics. I think you’re wrong. You may be right that only about 5% of people are well-informed about politics, but from my vantage point, even the not well-informed care intensely about it. Everyone I know is talking about Trump in one way or another. I grew up in the Midwest, have lived on both coasts, work for a human services nonprofit that serves people in poverty, and everybody I know — rich, poor, conservative, liberal, religious, non-religious, black, white, Latino, Asian — is talking about politics and Trump.
Most people don’t have the time to deeply research the political issues of the day, so many people latch onto the political opinions that appeal to them, often based on tribal affiliations. But that’s different than saying they vote their tribe because they don’t care.
@george:
I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but the greed wing of the Republican Party is getting shut out.
I didn’t say racism. I said white hegemony. Perhaps that qualifies as subtle racism, but that’s an incidental point. The actual point is that white people have enjoyed hundreds of years of being at the top of the pecking order, effectively because they’re white. That is slowly changing.
Couple that with the deteriorating social condition for much of the GOP base, and it becomes clear.
They’re accustomed to being – indeed, I would interject that they expect to be – at the top of the list. Now that the sand is shifting under them, they don’t like it.
And they’re lashing out.
For much of the world, the problem is religion (Protestant vs. Catholic in England, Hindu vs. Muslim in Asia, etc. ). It’s their defining sickness. The original sin, if you will, lying at the basis of their social order.
For better or worse, ours is race.
And it always has been …
@HarvardLaw92:
Kind of OT but I has a question:
If this judge does what he is signalling, can it be appealed? Or, can the judge be removed for his apparent bias?
CNN
We have one view of things – the constant negativism, propaganda, and sensationalism from news media. Then you have the view of the middle class working people out in the country. Both are completely different.
@Tyrell:
You mean the people who voted for a fat old man that would tear apart democracy and burn down our institutions?
Got it.
@Charon:
The short answer is: yes, but we’d term it a petition for mandamus, not an appeal, and yes. Federal judges have a legal obligation, under 28 US 455(a), to disqualify themselves from any matter in which their impartiality might reasonably be questioned (i.e. from the standpoint of a disinterested observer).
That initially seems to me to be the case here, and it is quite concerning, but it’s a single episode at this point. The government has the option to request that he recuse himself, but there is the significant risk that he would refuse to do so and that the action would further antagonize him. Generally speaking, prosecutors tend to ignore single incidents, both for the purpose of building a larger body of evidence in the event that recusal (voluntary or otherwise) becomes unavoidable and to avoid finding ourselves stuck before a hostile judge before we’ve done so.
Absent him voluntarily recusing himself (which I don’t see happening), getting rid of him would involve going before the 4th Circuit and petitioning for a writ of mandamus forcibly removing him from the case. They’re not going to remove him based on this limited display (although I would argue that they should). The smart move here is to let him hang himself – let the behavior continue, and be augmented by actions which are clearly prejudicial to the prosecution’s case and/or rulings which are clearly motivated by a prejudicial attitude towards the same – then use that to get rid of him.
@HarvardLaw92:
The problem, which was forseeable, is that Dennison and the right-wing echo chamber have already grabbed onto this and are milking it to death.
Obviously the fact that Manafort was in debt to these people and could be black-mailed makes it pertinent. Manfort himself said he wanted to be “made whole”.
This guy is reportedly 77…maybe like Dennison and Guiliani, he has gone round the bend.
@Daryl’s other brother Darryl:
I can’t speak to his mental state, but he’s clearly evincing prejudicial attitudes – and in a major way – towards the validity of the prosecution’s case. Were I prosecuting the matter, and this continued, I’d have no choice but to pursue getting rid of him. That having been said …
The problem with recusals is that, basically, if you propose to strike the king, you’d better kill him, or else when he gets back up, it won’t go well for you. This particular judge has been on that court forever, and everybody knows him. Absent an overwhelmingly convincing display of evidence that he’s biased & conducting his handling of the proceeding according to that bias, trying to get rid of him and failing will 1) put you in the position of having to proceed before a hostile judge, 2) potentially poison the waters at the appellate level if you find that you’ll be taking your matter there, and 3) creating ill will for yourself among the rest of the judges in the district(s) you’ll be subsequently proceeding in. It’s a tight rope to find yourself walking, but sometimes it can’t be avoided.
I have a feeling that he’ll keep it up, and they’ll eventually be forced to petition to have him recused.
@Monala:
Yes, I’m talking about well informed – I assume most Americans for instance know who the President is, and what party he leads. Its hard to assess interest, but my observation is that people either care a lot, or not at all, and almost everyone I know who cares a lot is also well informed. Which stands to reason, since anyone who cares finds it every easy to become informed (or misinformed). The number of people I’ve met who both care about politics but who don’t take the effort to follow it is tiny.
And most people I’ve talked to find it boring – if the subject is raised (by anyone) they give the same “not this again” expression and move on to sports or movies or anything else. Some of this is no doubt the sense that politics and religion shouldn’t be discussed, but the boredom is unmistakable – they really don’t care. It could be we talk to different people, but the folks I talk to are mainly in three only slightly overlapping groups: first nations, engineers, and farmers. None of them think politics is interesting, though the latter two think voting is a civic duty.
Your point is interesting though, and I did a few quick Googles to see if there was any real data on it, but I couldn’t find any. Which I suppose means I’m putting forth an opinion I can’t back with direct data.
@HarvardLaw92:
I think its more racism than hegemony. For one thing, most whites are middle class or lower, and despite the myth of America being a classless society, have as individuals never been within shouting distance from having any sort of power. In fact, power has been concentrated in the top 10% (and now 1%) so long that most people rightfully feel pretty far down the pecking order.
If it were about hegemony then the various ideologies pushing class consciousness would have done much better than they have (ie America would look much more like Europe in distribution of wealth, public health and so on).
@george:
Hegemony is local, and it isn’t about class. “Middle class” white voters have, for years, voted for policies that are essentially detrimental to their own interests.
As someone once said, America doesn’t have poor people. It has temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Interesting factoid: I had a discussion once about welfare programs, and the other person made a statement to the effect that it was largely lazy people milking the system because they didn’t want to go to work (and he heavily implied *black* people).
When I pointed out that the vast majority of welfare recipients are white, he pivoted to “they probably have children to feed”.
At basis, the sickness of this country is predicated on race, not class.
@HarvardLaw92:
We agree that the problem is about race, not class. But the dictionary definitions I’ve seen for hegemony define it as social class related – this is semantics, but I think that fits into my statement: “I think its more racism than hegemony.” because hegemony is about social class.
I really haven’t met many poor or middle class whites who feel they’re high in the pecking order – in fact most will claim the opposite. In fact, apparently even people making 400K a year (according to polls) feel they’re not rich and powerful, just average Joe’s and Jane’s. Statistically they’re clearly wrong about being average, but probably correct in their assessment to influence the laws and customs that affect them. Power is very concentrated in America.
Your example about welfare strikes me as displaying clear racism, but not hegemony – the whites saying things like that want welfare around because they know they’re low in pecking order and might need it, but don’t want it for non-whites because of racism.
@george:
Hegemony is about dominance & control.
Ask those poor / middle class whites if they feel that poor / middle class African-Americans are their cultural equals. I suspect that more of them than you’ll be comfortable with will say no.
Hmm.
Lies, huh?
Elsewhere…
Concise breakdown of what actually happened. Just facts. Good resource to inform the msm sheeple.
V IA Rick Dowling·~ HERE’S THE REAL DIRT ON COMEY, MUELLER, ROSENSTEIN, CLINTON, LERNER, ET AL.
From 2001 to 2005 there was an ongoing investigation into the Clinton Foundation.
A Grand Jury had been empaneled.
Governments from around the world had donated to the “Charity”.
Yet, from 2001 to 2003 none of those “Donations” to the Clinton
Foundation were declared.
Hmmm, now you would think that an honest investigator would be able to
figure this out.
Guess who took over this investigation in 2002?
Bet you can’t guess.
No other than James Comey.
Now, that’s interesting, isn’t it?
Guess who was transferred in to the Internal Revenue Service to run the Tax Exemption Branch of the IRS?
Your friend and mine, Lois “Be on The Look Out” (BOLO) Lerner.
Now, that’s interesting, isn’t it?
It gets better, well not really, but this is all just a series of
strange coincidences, right?
Guess who ran the Tax Division inside the Department of Injustice from 2001 to 2005?
No other than the Assistant Attorney General of the United States, Rod Rosenstein.
Now, that’s interesting, isn’t it?
Guess who was the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation during this time frame???
I know, it’s a miracle, just a coincidence, just an anomaly in
statistics and chances, Robert Mueller.
What do all four casting characters have in common?
They all were briefed and/or were front line investigators into the Clinton Foundation Investigation.
Now that’s just a coincidence, right?
Ok, lets chalk the last one up to mere chance.
Let’s fast forward to 2009.
James Comey leaves the Justice Department to go and cash-in at Lockheed Martin.
Hillary Clinton is running the State Department, on her own personal email server by the way.
The Uranium One “issue” comes to the attention of the Hillary.
Like all good public servants do, you know looking out for America’s best interest, she decides to support the decision and approve the sale of 20% of US Uranium to no other than, the Russians.
Now you would think that this is a fairly straight up deal, except it wasn’t, the People got absolutely nothing out of it.
However, prior to the sales approval, no other than Bill Clinton goes to Moscow, gets paid 500K for a one hour speech then meets with Vladimir Putin at his home for a few hours.
Ok, no big deal right?
Well, not so fast, the FBI had a mole inside the money laundering and bribery scheme.
Guess who was the FBI Director during this timeframe?
Yep, Robert Mueller.
He even delivered a Uranium Sample to Moscow in 2009.
Guess who was handling that case within the Justice Department out of the US Attorney’s Office in Maryland.
No other than, Rod Rosenstein.
Guess what happened to the informant?
The Department of Justice placed a GAG order on him and threatened to lock him up if he spoke out about it.
How does 20% of the most strategic asset of the United States of America end up in Russian hands when the FBI has an informant, a mole providing inside information to the FBI on the criminal enterprise?
Guess what happened soon after the sale was approved?
~145 million dollars in “donations” made their way into the Clinton Foundation from entities directly connected to the Uranium One deal.
Guess who was still at the Internal Revenue Service working the Charitable Division?
No other than, Lois Lerner.
Ok, that’s all just another series of coincidences, nothing to see here, right?
Let’s fast forward to 2015.
Due to a series of tragic events in Benghazi and after the 9
“investigations” the House, Senate and at State Department, Trey Gowdy who was running the 10th investigation as Chairman of the Select Committee on Benghazi discovers that the Hillary ran the State Department on an unclassified, unauthorized, outlaw personal email server.
He also discovered that none of those emails had been turned over when she departed her “Public Service” as Secretary of State which was required by law.
He also discovered that there was Top Secret information contained within her personally archived email.
Sparing you the State Departments cover up, the nostrums they floated, the delay tactics that were employed and the outright lies that were spewed forth from the necks of the Kerry State Department, we shall leave it with this…… they did everything humanly possible to cover for Hillary.
Now this is amazing, guess who became FBI Director in 2013?
Guess who secured 17 no bid contracts for his employer (Lockheed Martin) with the State Department and was rewarded with a six million dollar thank you present when he departed his employer.
No other than James Comey.
Amazing how all those no-bids just went right through at State, huh?
Now he is the FBI Director in charge of the “Clinton Email
Investigation” after of course his FBI Investigates the Lois Lerner “Matter” at the Internal Revenue Service and exonerates her.
Nope couldn’t find any crimes there.
Can you guess what happened next?
In April 2016, James Comey drafts an exoneration letter of Hillary Rodham Clinton, meanwhile the DOJ is handing out immunity deals like candy.
They didn’t even convene a Grand Jury.
Like a lightning bolt of statistical impossibility, like a miracle
from God himself, like the true “Gangsta” Homey is, James steps out into the cameras of an awaiting press conference on July the 8th of 2016, and exonerates the Hillary from any wrongdoing.
Can you see the pattern?
It goes on and on, Rosenstein becomes Asst. Attorney General, Comey gets fired based upon a letter by Rosenstein, Comey leaks government information to the press, Mueller is assigned to the Russian
Investigation sham by Rosenstein to provide cover for decades of malfeasance within the FBI and DOJ and the story continues.
FISA Abuse, political espionage….. pick a crime, any crime, chances are…… this group and a few others did it.
All the same players.
All compromised and conflicted.
All working fervently to NOT go to jail themselves.
All connected in one way or another to the Clinton’s.
They are like battery acid, they corrode and corrupt everything they touch.
How many lives have these two destroyed?
As of this writing, the Clinton Foundation, in its 20+ years of
operation of being the largest International Charity Fraud in the history of mankind, has never been audited by the Internal Revenue Service.
Let us not forget that Comey’s brother works for DLA Piper, the law firm that does the Clinton Foundation’s taxes.
So the people that are supposedly investigating these supposedly eyes, turn out to be Liars of the first order themselves. Unless that is you believe all these coincidences are completely innocent.
You’ll forgive me if I don’t stand up and salute
@Eric Florack: “It goes on and on, Rosenstein becomes Asst. Attorney General”
Out of this whole string of gibberish, this is the one phrase that jumps up and immediately calls this all out as BS. Because Rosenstein didn’t “become” Asst. Attorney General. Rosenstein was appointed to that position. By Donald Trump.
So unless you’re claiming that this conspiracy is so vast it includes Trump among its number, then you need to acknowledge that this is just the product of some total loser stringing together a bunch of information and misinformation and hoping that the gullible morons out there will put it together the way he wants.
Good going there.
@wr:
Which, quite obviously, has worked.
@HarvardLaw92:
I have no doubt that many will say they’re culturally and socially superior (actually I think most people will say their culture is superior, and through-out the world), though I’m not sure why I’d find that knowledge uncomfortable – its a daily experience that I’ve long since become used to. However, that’s a long way from them thinking they’re up in the pecking order. Most will simultaneously say that they have very little control over what goes on in society – and they’d be correct. Your average white (or any race) middle class person has no hegemony anywhere outside their home.
As you say, hegemony is about dominance and control, and in America both fall to a very small group, the 1% (and probably even smaller than that), and that group defines itself chiefly through great wealth and political power. Its an illusion that any middle class person (or even upper middle class) has hegemony. And while there are probably still a few who stick to the illusion of America being classless, they’re a definite minority. Most people are very aware of their lack of control of their lives – and I suspect things like the rates of depression and suicide are a symptom of just that.
@george:
We’ll just have to agree to disagree
@HarvardLaw92:
As so often in the real world, its probably the best way forward. Its certainly the norm in engineering.
@Eric Florack: Question. How many current admin personnel are using personal email accounts instead of government accounts for official matters? Is the DOJ investigating it?