The Decline of the West - Boris Johnson takes to the airwaves to lie, lie and lie again / Donald Trump has now said more than 10,000 untrue things as president
Bumbling Boris Johnson takes to the airwaves to lie, lie and lie again
Donald Trump has now said more than 10,000 untrue things as president. And that's not the big story
That the President of the United States doesn't tell the truth - a lot - is not new news. And so, while the fact that President Donald Trump has now said more than 10,000 false or misleading things in his first 827 days in office, according to The Washington Post Fact Checker, is both galling and appalling isn't all that surprising. What is surprising -- and even more important -- than the sheer number of falsehoods Trump spews is that the rate at which he does so has picked up dramatically seemingly with every month he has spent in the White House.
Someone accused the US president of rape. The media shrugged
Trump's toadyism to Saudi Arabia: a new moral low
In Moscow, Riyadh and Washington, this is the age of the shameless lie
You can see why Boris
Johnson’s carers have chosen to mothball him in recent weeks. His decline has
been almost total. Johnson never did much care for the past or the future.
Every day has always been a tabula rasa, one on which he was free to reinvent
himself as he pleased without being bound by any commitments he may have made.
Now though, he appears to barely have a present.
Unable even to maintain the
most basic rules of conversation, his words are just a scattergun of free
association. Nick Ferrari began
Johnson’s LBC radio interview with a few easy rapid-fire yes and no questions
as if to establish a benchmark for the lie detector. It proved hard work as
Johnson was such a shambles he could barely even confirm his name. Was he a
coward? That should have been a no brainer. That’s the one thing on which
everyone – even his friends – agree. Johnson merely looked confused. The
silence was interpreted as a yes on the polygraph. Ferrari moved on to the
staged photograph of Johnson and Carrie Symonds in a Sussex garden. Did he
know who had taken the picture? “Um... er...,” mumbled Boris. There had been so
many photos...
Could he remember when it was
taken? A look of panic crossed his face. When you’ve told so many lies, there’s
always a danger you might accidentally tell the truth….Donald Trump has now said more than 10,000 untrue things as president. And that's not the big story
That the President of the United States doesn't tell the truth - a lot - is not new news. And so, while the fact that President Donald Trump has now said more than 10,000 false or misleading things in his first 827 days in office, according to The Washington Post Fact Checker, is both galling and appalling isn't all that surprising. What is surprising -- and even more important -- than the sheer number of falsehoods Trump spews is that the rate at which he does so has picked up dramatically seemingly with every month he has spent in the White House.
Someone accused the US president of rape. The media shrugged
Trump's toadyism to Saudi Arabia: a new moral low
In Moscow, Riyadh and Washington, this is the age of the shameless lie
This line, from the Fact Checker analysis, was knock-you-over stuff for me: "All told, the
president racked up 171 false or misleading claims in just three days, April
25-27. That's more than he made in any single month in the first five months of
his presidency." Think on that for a
minute. In a three-day period, the President said or tweeted 171 untruths.
That's an average of 57 untruths a day. It's hard to do that even if you are
trying. Over the last seven
months, again according to Fact Checker calculations, Trump is not telling the
truth at a rate THREE times higher than he did in his first 600 days in office
-- and even then he was averaging eight false or misleading statements a day.
What's clear here is
that as Trump's presidency rolls along, he retreats more and more into a world
of his own creation, a world that is increasingly devoid of any objectively
accepted facts. What's also clear is that as Trump turns more and more to his
2020 reelection race, his exaggerations, distortions and outright lies grow
more and more common. All of which means
that if it took 827 days to say 10,000 false things, it could well take half
that time for him to get to 20,000. (In case you are wondering, 413 days from
today is June 15, 2020 -- which is right in the heart of the campaign season. Two things are true
about this stunning mountain of lies and distortions:
1) It will make very
little difference as to whether Trump is reelected in 2020
2) It is the defining
trait of his presidency and will be his lasting legacy on politics.. read more: