Scope of Trump's falsehoods unprecedented for modern presidential candidate

[Libertine]

The scope of Trump's falsehoods are unprecedented for a modern presidential candidate

Trump received the '2015 Lie of the Year Award' from PolitiFact

Trump's supporters believe they’re getting lied to constantly, so if their hero tells lies, they don’t care. — Rob Stutzman, Republican strategist


Donald Trump says that taxes in the United States are higher than almost anywhere else on earth. They’re not.

He says he opposed the Iraq war from the start. He didn’t.

Now, after years of spreading the lie that President Obama was born in Africa, Trump says that Hillary Clinton did it first (untrue) and that he’s the one who put the controversy to rest (also untrue).

Never in modern presidential politics has a major candidate made false statements as routinely as Trump has.

Over and over, independent researchers have examined what the Republican nominee says and concluded it was not the truth — by “pants on fire” (PolitiFact) or “four Pinocchios” (Washington Post Fact Checker).

Trump’s candidacy was premised on upending a dishonest establishment that has rigged American political and economic life, so many of his loyalists are willing to overlook his lies, as long as he rankles the powerful, said Republican strategist Rob Stutzman.

“It gives him not only license, but incentive to spin fantasy, because no one expects him to tell the truth,” said Stutzman, who worked against Trump during the primaries. “They believe they’re getting lied to constantly, so if their hero tells lies in order to strike back, they don’t care.”

The scope of Trump’s falsehoods is unprecedented, and he is dogged in refusing to stop saying things once they are proved untrue.

BuzzFeed unearthed an audio recording showing that Trump backed the Iraq invasion and a 2011 video in which he called for swift military action against Moammar Kadafi, then the leader of Libya. In the months since those disclosures, Trump has lied dozens of times on both issues, saying he opposed the use of force in Iraq and Libya.

Thomas E. Mann, a resident scholar at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies, said Trump appears to recognize that a faction of the Republican Party has lost respect for facts, evidence and science — presuming, for example, that anything negative said about Obama is probably true.

Moreover, he said, the New York business mogul once thrived as a reality television star playing himself on “The Apprentice,” and in that realm there’s “no need to have any touch with genuine reality — it’s all as he defines it.”

“He’s a salesman,” Mann said. “He’s a con man. He’s hustled people out of money that they’re owed. He’s lived off tax shelters. He’s always looking for a scheme and a con, and in that sphere, you just fall into telling lies as a matter of course.”

In “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” his 1987 best-seller, Trump said “a little hyperbole never hurts.”

“People believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion,” he said.

Trump’s coauthor, Tony Schwartz, put it less benignly in a July interview with the New Yorker. “He lied strategically,” Schwartz recalled. “He had a complete lack of conscience about it.”

PolitiFact, a Tampa Bay Times site that won a Pulitzer for its coverage of the 2008 election, has rated 70% of the Trump statements it has checked as mostly false, false or “pants on fire,” its lowest score. By contrast, 28% of Clinton’s statements earned those ratings.

“As we noted when we awarded Trump our 2015 Lie of the Year award for his portfolio of misstatements, no other politician has as many statements rated so far down the dial,” PolitiFact writer Lauren Carroll reported in June. “It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”

When Trump released his child-care plan on Sept. 13, he said Clinton didn’t have one. She did. He has often described himself as popular among African Americans; the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll found only 2% of black voters support him.

Trump also depicts crime as rising and out of control in America’s inner cities despite years of falling crime rates. He has said that black people kill 81% of white homicide victims, when in fact whites kill 82% of white homicide victims, according to PolitiFact.

Marty Kaplan, a professor of entertainment, media and society at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, has two theories on Trump’s falsehoods.

Perhaps he’s just putting on an act, like P.T. Barnum — a “marketer, con, snake-oil salesman who knows better, knows how to get the rubes into the tent.” Or maybe, Kaplan suggested, Trump is just “completely unconstrained by logic, rules, tradition, truth, law.”

“I’m confused,” he said, “whether the whole fact-free zone that he’s in is a strategic calculation or a kind of psychosis.”


Los Angeles Times
9-25-16

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-n...nap-story.html