Why Does Trump Lie?
He has
nothing but contempt for the institutions that exist to keep presidents in
check.
Contributing
Opinion Writer
·
June 11, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET
A President with his own set of
facts; President Donald J. Trump presented his version of the facts about
coronavirus testing in The United States in the Rose Garden of the White House
in May.Credit...Pool photo by Oliver Contreras
The lies and obfuscations pile up. No,
it wasn’t tear gas used to clear Lafayette Park for President Trump’s
Bible-waving photo-op last Monday night, Attorney General William Barr said on
CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. Rather it was “pepper balls,” he said.
“Pepper spray is not a chemical irritant. It’s not chemical.” Wrong, according to The Washington
Post; pepper balls are very much a chemical irritant. The paper
awarded the nation’s top law enforcement officer four Pinocchios for his claim.
President Trump himself keeps at it,
too. On the morning of June 4, he tweeted: “[Robert]
Mueller should have never been appointed, although he did prove that I must be
the most honest man in America!”
As of May 29, the most honest man in
America had uttered 19,127 false or misleading claims in his 1,226 days in
office, according to Glenn Kessler of
The Post, who has been tracking them since Day 1. That’s 15.6
falsehoods a day, or roughly one per waking hour, every hour, every day. That
puts him on track to hit 20,000 lies by Wednesday, July 29; by Nov. 3, at this
pace, he’ll be north of 22,000 — but of course that period will constitute the
heat of the campaign, when the frequency seems likely to increase.
All
right, some still say; Yes, Mr. Trump is worse than normal, but they all lie.
What’s the big deal, really?
Here’s the big deal. Mr. Trump’s lies
are different. Not just in quantity, but also in quality.
He lies for a
different purpose than every other president — yes, even, I would argue,
Richard Nixon, the biggest presidential prevaricator until Mr. Trump came
along.
What is that difference? In a nutshell,
it is this: Our democracy has, to use a word that former Vice President Joe
Biden employed in his powerful June 2 speech in Philadelphia, certain
guardrails that, as Mr. Biden put it, “have helped
make possible this nation’s path to a more perfect union, a union that
constantly requires reform and rededication.” Every president before Mr. Trump
has been mindful of those guardrails. When they lied, they lied out of respect
for those guardrails. Mr. Trump lies to crush those guardrails into scrap
metal.
Let’s take the George W. Bush
administration and the run-up to the Iraq war. I know that we still debate
whether administration figures lied or were the victims of faulty intelligence.
To me, the evidence is overwhelming that they knowingly lied about the
immediacy of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Indeed, part of the reason the
intel was faulty was they created a special intelligence unit within the Pentagon to
tell them what they wanted to hear.
So let’s say they lied. The lies were
bad; I’m not saying they weren’t. And they had calamitous consequences. But
they were crafted in a way that heeded the existence of the guardrails. The
very example I cited above — the creation of what they called the Office of Special Plans — is proof of this. They
knew they couldn’t just go before the American public and say any old thing,
grounded in nothing. They knew they had to make the case for war within a
certain process that existed, that honored precedent and that seemed
evidence-based and “democratic.”
The
Bush team on Iraq, Lyndon Johnson on the Gulf of Tonkin incident, even Mr.
Nixon on Watergate — in all those cases, lies were told. But Presidents Bush,
Johnson and Nixon also knew and implicitly accepted that lying to the American
people had limits, limits that were enforced by the truth-finding institutions
and principles that are essential to a democracy — the free press, free speech,
constitutional checks and balances, legitimate independent investigations. On
this last point, the contrast between Mr. Nixon, who agreed to send
administration officials to testify before the Senate Watergate committee, and
Mr. Trump, who is fighting any such cooperation all the way up to the Supreme
Court, is stark.
Whatever else they did, these earlier
presidents understood these limits and respected the institutions enough to try
to sneak around them. Additionally, they understood the value of these
institutions to hold the opposition in check when the other side is in power.
And all previous presidents at some level took these institutions as givens in
a functioning democracy, which they all believed should endure.
Not so the incumbent. It often
befuddles observers that Mr. Trump has no urge to hide his lies. Of course he
doesn’t. Because he doesn’t care if he’s caught, because he has no regard for
the democratic limits named above. His only real purposes are holding on to
power by any means necessary and relentlessly reinventing himself to keep his
reality show on the air for as long as possible.
So, far from respecting the
institutions enough to sneak around them or appear to conform with their rules,
he is perfectly happy to destroy those institutions that might expose him (the
press, Congress, the courts, the inspectors general). He has nothing but contempt
for the institutions that check him, so he has no urge to hide anything. And of
course — maybe the most frightening part of all — he has not a moment’s concern
for what endures after he’s gone.
So
this is what makes his lies worse. They threaten the foundations of the
republic in a way that even Mr. Nixon’s did not. And they will only get worse.
If we’ve learned one thing about the president, it’s certainly this: It will
always get worse. It’s mortifying enough to imagine the damage he can do in the
next five months, let alone the next five years if he’s re-elected.
