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Lies and the lying liars

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 27, 2023

It’s the contagion, stupid

New York State Supreme Court judge Arthur Engoron ruled Tuesday that Donald J. Trump, the former U.S. president, is a liar. His Trump Organization is a lie. His claims about his wealth are lies. All of this is known. David Cay Johnston knew long before Trump ran for president. David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner of the New York Times won Pulitzers for exposing the Trump family’s corrupt and fraudulent practices in 2018. The Washington Post gave up counting Trump’s lies and misleading statements as president when they topped 30,000.

Sure, everyone lies occasionally. But Al Franken lampooned the right’s enthusiasm for lying in “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them” (2003) before his stint as a U.S. senator. Lying as matter of course, as a political tactic, as a means of conducting oneself day to day was common before Trump. (Remember “death panels”?) Conspiracy theories built on smears and lies have been around for decades. But lying as a way to make a fortune at others’ expense seemed to become a contagion under Trump.

CNN reported in 2019:

Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said he has “no obligation” to tell the truth to the media while acknowledging that he had not told the truth when asked earlier this year about his interactions with President Donald Trump.

Lewandowski was blunt about it, belligerent about it, perhaps proud of it.

An incident on Tuesday reinforced just how much lying with shameless abandon has become standard operating procedure on the right. President Biden went to Michigan to stand in solidarity with striking auto workers. He told them, “I marched a lot of UAW picket lines when I was a Senator since 1973. But I tell you what— first time I’ve ever done it as president.”

Benny Johnson, a right-wing media influencer with over 1.8 million followers on formerly Twitter, posted a clip of Biden misreporting “first time I’ve ever done it as president” as “first time I’ve ever done it in person.”

“He clearly says ‘As President’ but you knew that,” the Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson posted of the lie.

BuzzFeed.com fired Johnson for plagiarsism in July 2014. The National Review snapped him up that September, telling the press Johnson had learned his lesson. The conservative Independent Journal Review hired him in 2015 but suspended Johnson and two others in 2017 after “publication of a conspiratorial article that suggested that former president Barack Obama might have influenced a federal judge in Hawaii to rule against President Trump’s revised travel ban.”

Johnson is now reportedly chief creative officer at Charlie Kirk‘s Turning Point USA.

The opposite of truth

Reuters reports this morning:

Elon Musk’s X, formerly called Twitter, disabled a feature that let users report misinformation about elections, a research organisation said on Wednesday, throwing fresh concern about false claims spreading just before major U.S. and Australian votes.

After introducing a feature in 2022 for users to report a post they considered misleading about politics, X in the past week removed the “politics” category from its drop-down menu in every jurisdiction but the European Union, said the researcher Reset.Tech Australia.

Adam Serwer comments at BlueSky, “The catalyst for the takeover was in part frustration that pre musk twitter was not a pliant conduit for right wing election misinformation .”

Speaker Kevin McCarthy, commenting on the Biden visit to Michigan, said, “President Biden just joined a picket line. Wait til he finds out autoworkers are picketing because he subsidized electric cars and sent their jobs overseas.”

“This is the opposite of the truth,” the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent replied. “One of the UAW’s core demands is that EV-related manufacturing workers should be folded into the Big Three/UAW contracts. Those jobs are here in the US. By contrast, Kevin McCarthy and Republicans oppose the policies that help create those jobs.”

Doesn’t matter. Lying is SOP on the right now.

The Trump rot

This is a contagion, a contagion in circulation before Trumpism, but one his example encouraged to spread as freely as his COVID-19 disinformation and Big Lie. In both instances, Americans died.

Let’s look back to August 2020:

Norman Eisen, impeachment counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, writes of the moment he realized just how corrupt the Republican defense of Donald Trump would be. His attorneys told the U.S. Senate, “In the Judiciary Committee . . . there were no rights for the president.” They claimed the president had been denied due process. It was a lie. In fact, Trump had stonewalled.

Eisen continues:

That was the moment I realized how dangerously deep the Trump rot went: The president’s lawyers could have defended him capably without stooping to this. Lawyers are not in place to repeat the excesses of their clients. And yet Trump had managed to finagle his team into an alarming display of mimicry. Falsehood was his stock in trade, and they were enthusiastic franchisees. Worse, the GOP-controlled Senate was all too ready to accept it.

People who live a lie, teach lies, and defend lies, find it very easy to lie.

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