Dishonesty is the defining characteristics of Trump and his administration, and lies are a daily occurrence. While there are far too many lies to track, I thought a thread dedicated to the worst and most notable lies would be useful. There’s a lot of material to choose from.
(I could have tapped into a rich vein of lies simply by linking to Trump’s Truth Social account — hence the OP title.)
Allan Miller,
Now are you down grading your claim from lies to falsehoods? Maybe we can agree he has made some claims that have turned out to be false. I am sure you can most likely demonstrate this.
Do you have a few of his claims you can demonstrate to be false? Do any of these claims have advisarial effect on the American or global population?
Yes I remember the discussion burden tennis 🙂
See, Allan, now you have somewhat less of a burden of proof. What a relief!
keiths,
It applies to all of us. If I make a claim then I need to support it. You need to recognise the sources you are using are problematic in supporting your claims. We are in a world on continuous propaganda from all sides of the political spectrum.
What you should not do is resort to other logical fallacies like the straw man argument (fallacy) you proposed. I have not claimed “Trump never lies”.
Here is my reply to Allan perviously.
You have not satisfied the burden of proof a “lying” accusation requires and the fact you do not realise this points to ideology first thinking. Since you are simply Trump bashing you are trying to hang on to the label “liar” to demonise our current President. The label that Allan is proposing “falsehood” has an easier burden but not the demonising punch “liar” has.
colewd:
You haven’t acknowledged a single lie in the entirety of our eight month discussion. The closest you came was when you said that Trump’s claim about ending
sixseveneighttenwars was “not well supported”.But if you do finally acknowledge that Trump lies, that’s great. Let’s talk about it. What’s the most recent lie you’ve heard him tell, and how do you know that it’s a lie? This will help me understand what your criteria are.
You’ve also said that Bill Clinton lied, and I agree. What criteria did you apply in making that determination?
You keep forgetting: I am not like you. I don’t blindly trust media outlets, and I don’t blindly trust politicians. Not the Washington Post, not Fox News, not Trump, not Harris, not Mike Johnson, not Hakeem Jeffries, not John Thune, not Chuck Schumer. I know how to fact check, and unlike you, I am willing to accept reality even when it disappoints me.
There’s a reason I’ve caught you in factual error after factual error, while you haven’t caught me in a single one. In eight months. I’m happy to share my not-so-secret ways of separating fact from fiction, regardless of the source, if you’re willing to listen. I have a feeling you aren’t.
You want to discount everything that any left-leaning news outlet (including the Washington Post) says because you’re afraid that some of what they’re saying is true. You’re right about that. A great deal of what they say is true, and it makes your Dear Leader look really, really bad. Horrible, in fact. That distresses you, and you’d rather not look into it for fear of finding out that it is in fact true.
So you dismiss everything they say that is negative about Trump. You’re hiding from the truth. By contrast, I don’t dismiss everything that Fox News says. If they say something that’s true, it’s true, even if I wish it weren’t. I care about truth. You care about Trump.
You say that Trump isn’t lying about all the things we’ve pointed out. Your main defense of him so far has not been to challenge the factual accuracy of what we say, since you know that we’re right, but to argue instead that we don’t know with certainty that Trump knows that what he’s saying is false. If it isn’t intentional, he isn’t lying, and I agree with you on that.
Here’s the problem: I could apply that same logic. Unless we know with certainty that Trump isn’t intentionally saying false things, we can’t conclude that he isn’t lying. So by your criterion, we don’t know whether Trump is or isn’t lying unless we have certainty one way or the other about his state of mind.
Why aren’t you saying that? It’s because you, like us, know that absolute certainty isn’t necessary. You’ve said that Bill Clinton lied, yet you don’t know with absolute certainty that he didn’t believe what he was saying. You have a double standard, and you need to, because without one it becomes obvious that Trump lies constantly.
Here’s the right way for us to decide whether someone is lying: we should look at the evidence and ask ourselves: “Given this evidence, which is more likely? 1) That this person is deliberately stating a falsehood, or 2) that it isn’t deliberate and they actually believe what they’re saying?” That’s exactly the kind of discussion I want to have with you, and it’s exactly the kind of discussion you don’t want to have with me. That’s why you keep avoiding my questions. You know what conclusion they will lead to, and that scares you. Cult members are allergic to the cold hard truth about their cult leaders.
I’m asking you to summon some courage. Let’s discuss some of these examples. Above, I wrote:
Be brave. State your case. I’ll state mine, and we can compare them to see whose conclusion best fits the evidence and how much better it is vs the alternative.
All of this is from one Truth Social post on November 26:
Trump:
Truth:
Trump:
Truth:
Trump:
Truth:
Trump:
Truth:
Trump:
Truth:
Trump:
Truth:
Trump:
Truth:
Trump:
Truth:
Trump:
Truth:
Trump:
Truth:
Trump:
Truth:
Trump:
Truth:
Trump:
Truth:
Trump:
Truth:
All of this in a single Truth Social post. It’s pathological.
You have not spelled out what, according to you, the burden of proof is – except there must be “intent”. But by the standard of intent Trump has been easily proven a monster liar and convicted of lying in courts. This somehow is not enough for you, which in turn proves that the problem is not Trump or his lying, but you – it is your brainwashed idiocy that is the problem.
You really have no standards. You lack of definitions. Your terms are those of a lying moron (you’re a “very low-IQ person” as Trump would say), relying on denial of reality, double standards, moving goalposts, and many other fallacies with a specific cultish bias to worship Trump and bash very simple easily observable facts that have been pointed out to you.
For example:
So here your ultimate standard is elections: You’re saying that Trump won, therefore he is right. One of the many obvious problems with this is that you do not apply the same standard to Biden – somehow all the problems with the economy are Biden’s fault, even though he too won elections at one point. In USA, both parties win elections alternately, so do you switch to whining about “rightist media propaganda bias” when a Democrat president is in power?
American elections are not truth-tellers and you as an American voter are the proof of it. You do not know what truth is, you do not care about facts, and you love lying when Trump does it. And you lie for Trump.
Dasha Burns, for Politico:
Trump:
Burns:
Trump:
Lol. Great way to position yourself for the midterms, Donald.
colewd,
It is you who sets the impossible bar that a ‘lie’ must carry with it intent.
Do you have any examples?
Is lying OK if it does not have an [adverse?] effect on the population? Objective Morality, ladies and gents. Clinton is relieved.
colewd,
Excellent.
Your claim: Washington Post’s list of 30000+ lies, or our Channel 4’s hours-long Trump vs the Truth are ‘propaganda’ – are themselves -falsehoods. Did I miss the post where you supported it?
Allan Miller,
From ChatGpt
From ChatGPT
So the media took something based on the Washington Posts opinion called “false or misleading statements and labeled them lies”. What could have been reasonable analysis turns into propaganda. by labelling it to push a narrative.
Any politician that promises something and does not deliver looking backwards has committed a false or misleading statement. I don’t believe any President has kept all their commitments.
Hahahha the president of the US told 30.000 falsehoods but he’s just misinformed, not a single lie among them. He’s such a moral character after all. Dumb, decieved, incompetent. But dishonest? NOT A CHANCE.
LMAO
Muh biased media u guys. Trust nobody in media ever. Only ever Trump himself or his favorite suckup channels Newsmax, ONN, and Fox News.
Btw I’m not in a cult it’s all just spin and propaganda. Kiss the dear orange leader.
Rumraket:
Sure, he’s corrupt, cruel, selfish, disloyal, childish, racist, and vindictive. But dishonest? How dare anyone make such a suggestion!
colewd:
Not opinion. Facts. They documented every entry in that database.
So your position is that if some of the 30,573 were unintentional, then all of them were unintentional? And that those 30,573 unintentional false statements all just happened to be in Trump’s favor, by pure coincidence?
You are terrified of having a reasonable discussion about this. I’ve been trying literally for months to get you to discuss specific falsehoods and whether they amount to lies. (They do, obviously.) Every time, you just run away.
As if false promises were the only falsehoods to escape Trump’s lips.
Let’s talk specifics, Bill. Above, I asked:
What is your explanation, and why do you think it’s better than the obvious one, which is that Trump is lying in an attempt to cover up his failure?
colewd,
Suppose Trump were here, reading this thread, and he asked you:
What would you say? How would you justify your failure to him?
Anyhoo, I hear that that bastion of free speech America is planning to ask for 5 years of social media for ESTA applications. I doubt this place counts, but I have mocked and criticised His Orangeness from time to time so I guess I’ll be persona non grata for the foreseeable. It’s funny, because Yanks imagine that we are under some kind of speech iron fist. You can’t be strongly racist, but who wants to? You can certainly criticise Starmer, as resident or foreigner; it comes with the territory.
Of course, I could just delete my accounts, but I’m not jumping through hoops; America can fuck off.
Shame. I quite like the place, and some of the people.
So you accept that your idol has uttered 30,000+ false or misleading statements, but not one lie? That is actually an epic work rate, even taking refuge in weedy semantics. “No-one in history has come close to that tally of false or misleading statements. ‘Sir’, they say, ‘your ability to utter false or misleading statements is unprecedented’. That’s a funny word, unprecedented. No-one’s seen it before”.
Just last night, at his Pennsylvania rally, Trump confirmed that he had lied back in 2018 after a private meeting with senators. He recounted:
Following that meeting, there was outrage over his use of the phrase ‘shithole countries’. Trump denied having said it:
Now he’s confirming it. It puts you in a difficult position, Bill. Is he lying now, or was he lying then? Or are you going to argue that he’s terminally confused and had no idea then or now of what he actually said?
To reality-based folks, it’s obvious. He used the phrase ‘shithole countries’, as the Democratic senators reported at the time and as he now has confirmed. He lied about it back then when it was politically harmful to admit that he said it, but he’s boasting about it now because he knows that his racism is appealing to many in the MAGA base.
He’s a lying, racist creep. Among his other lies last night, he said:
She didn’t marry her brother, she’s not here illegally, what she wears isn’t a “turban” (as any educated person knows), and Donald Trump is a racist creep.
keiths,
Also weird how he can’t seem to fathom why people want to leave Somalia and come to the US (and Scandinavia), but generally don’t want to leave Scandinavia and come to the US. Why can’t you have “some nice people?” Well Donald it’s because we don’t want to leave Scandinavia for something worse.
Allan Miller,
I think you should look at the data carefully before you ask this question.
Allan:
colewd:
That makes no sense. His question is about you and your beliefs.There’s no data for him to look at other than your answer.
I, too, am interested in your answer. Do you think there are no lies in that database of 30,573 false or misleading statements?
Earlier you acknowledged that Trump, like everyone else, has lied. What you didn’t say, and what you clearly don’t want to say, is whether you think he has lied during his presidency or is lying now. We say that he is. For the record, do you agree?
For instance, do you agree that he is lying about prices and inflation? If yes, that’s tremendous progress. You’re starting to come to grips with reality. If not, I’ll pose my questions again:
My impression is that you think Trump is lying. If you didn’t, you’d be defending him instead of running away from those questions. You wish he weren’t lying, and you wish you could defend him, but he is and you can’t. You’d rather run away than admit that, so you flee. You aren’t fooling anyone.
It’s a painful predicament for a cult member to find himself in. The president would be so disappointed in you, Bill. You claim to support him, so why aren’t you standing up for him? Why are you letting me get away with calling him a liar on prices and inflation? Is it because you, like the rest of us, know that he is lying?
Why would I need to look at the data carefully before asking you a (rhetorical) question? Have you looked at the data? What will I see if I do?
Allan Miller,
You will understand that they are counting repeated assertions as part of the number and you will see that they are the arbitrator of what is a fact in many cases. This has all the makings of propaganda.
Now, this is a claim, so prove it. Point out at least one quote from Trump in Washington Post database that is a repetition. Or at least one that is not a lie.
ChatGPT or Grok does not qualify. Do your own research. Just one is enough.
Of course, you will never back up your own claims, because you are a factless cultist brainwashed by propaganda.
I am well aware that they count the same lie multiple times if he repeats it. That doesn’t make it propaganda, just that he lies repetitively as well as prodigiously.
Washington Post counted a claim per topic per venue. If Trump repeated it on a different venue, then this does not make it less of lie, but rather indicates how much he likes to lie about a particular topic. One of his biggest lies is the Big Lie. Very intentional.
Washington Post did not do repetition. Trump did, with variations worth counting https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/
Erik,
I am enjoying the “scalloping” of Trump’s rate of false-or-misleading-statements (FOMS). It is reminiscent of a rat in a Skinner box on a fixed-interval reward contingency. Which I guess he is.
5,000 FOMS in the month leading up to the election. That’s one motivated rodent.
Allan Miller,
They also are the judge of what is true and false and are a known Trump hating left leaning news outlet. Differentiating propaganda and spin from real information is very important in making decisions.
The challenge we all have is politically neutral news is very hard to find even in podcasts.
colewd, to Allan:
Of course they are. How could they not be? In order to compile a database of false or misleading statements, they had to decide which were false or misleading and which weren’t. Isn’t that obvious? How else could they have done it?
It’s certainly not a sign of propaganda. Nor is the fact that they counted repeated lies. They made their criterion clear: if a lie got repeated at the same event, it was only counted once. If it was repeated at a second event, it got counted again. That makes perfect sense: telling the same lie to multiple audiences is worse than telling it once and then stopping.
Yes, which is why you should acquire those skills. I reiterate my offer: if you are willing to listen, I will give you some tips.
You seem to think we should
1) look at a bunch of news sources;
2) decide which are politically neutral; and then
3) trust whatever they say.
Bad approach. What you should do instead:
1) learn fact-checking and critical thinking skills;
2) consume news from a wide range of sources;
3) don’t trust any source blindly; and
4) apply the aforementioned skills in judging what’s true and false.
Let’s be honest, though. You’re not looking for politically neutral news sources. If you were, you wouldn’t be drinking from the firehose of right-wing misinformation and regurgitating it here. Your real goal is to discredit negative truths about your Dear Leader, and since you know there are a shitload of negative truths in the WaPo database, you want an excuse for ignoring the database altogether. Writing it off as “left-wing propaganda” without even examining it is your lame excuse for ignoring it. That won’t fly.
If you want to convince us that it’s propaganda, show us that it’s propaganda. Quote from it and demonstrate that the entries are false.
Even if it were propaganda — and it clearly isn’t — that wouldn’t mean that none of it is true. I’ve said it over and over, and I’ll say it again: whether something is true or false depends on whether it’s true or false, period. It doesn’t depend on who’s saying it.
Fox News is notoriously unreliable and biased, but I don’t write them off the way you’re trying to write off the Post. I look at the things they say and judge whether they’re true or false. Sometimes what they say is true, often it isn’t. Why not apply that approach to the WaPo and its database?
Not as easy as you make it sound. OK, so Trump gives one of his rambling speeches, takes 90 minutes. You (presenting the news) have perhaps 90 seconds of air time to cover that speech. And an important part of that coverage is to show the size and enthusiasm of the crowd. You have no choice but to cherry pick 90 seconds of something, but what? Sure, you can make the crowd look sparse, not have them on camera when they cheer or applaud, pick out the most obvious points where Trump loses his focus or seems confused. No shortage of these. Surround this report with related coverage making your speech selections sound inappropriate or clueless.
BUT with the exact same 90 minutes of footage, you can do the opposite – only show the densest part of crowd and only their applause, pick the most entertaining things Trump expressed, and avoid any lies. Splice excerpts together to make them seem part of a coherent train of thought. Have your anchors “interpret” what you select to make them seem desirable. Things like that.
Note that I have not mentioned whether anything in the speech was actually a lie, or even a misrepresentation. The goal with either approach was to present an impression, either positive or negative. You can use this original raw material to make Trump seem either like a worthy leader or an incompetent half-senile fool, without ever once capturing a sound bite you can look up and find false.
And I would challenge you to edit this speech to make it “neutral”, whatever that means.
Either they are correct or they are not. It should be straightforward for you to examine any one of the claims for merit. If you argue it is propaganda – actual propaganda, not “I bet it’s propaganda cos lefties hate Trump” – then an example should be easy to find.
News outlets of course decide what news is. This is news to you because you do not know what news is. And you have never stopped to consider why all outlets seem Trump-hating and left-leaning to you – it is because you are a factless brainwashed Trump-worshipping cultist.
Flint:
Fact-checking doesn’t apply solely to statements. You can check impressions, too. I once saw a video mocking Trump for the small crowd size at one of his rallies, but when I investigated I found that the crowd shots were deceptive, taken well before the rally started when people were still arriving. A more recent example: A video in which someone read what Kristi Noem said at Trump’s recent North-Korea-style Cabinet meeting. Noem credited Trump for the fact that there were no hurricanes this season, and the person quoting her was mocking her for her supposed stupidity. It sounded fishy to me, so I watched a video of the meeting, and it was clear that Noem was joking when she said that.
The principle is the same whether you’re validating impressions or validating statements: check multiple sources, don’t blindly trust any of them, and apply your critical thinking skills.
It is very important to note whether those videos were news or opinion/commentary. In USA at the national level real news, real journalism, barely exists. Sean Hannity is not news. Rachel Maddow is not news. Fox News (at the national level) is not news, but it has News in its name and there is real journalism going on at local Fox stations, so most people think it’s news all the way.
PBS Newshour is actual news, real journalism in USA, so were those videos there? If not, then the deceptive videos you are talking about are not an example of “biased media” that would justify skepticism of journalism.
I mention these names because these are big names employed by major mainstream media companies that are patently not doing news despite their undeniable journalistic qualifications. So obviously I am saying that unqualified high-school dropouts like Tim Pool and Alex Jones, and any other podcaster dudes, have absolutely nothing to do with journalism despite widely held uninformed opinions to the contrary.
“Independent media” in the form of YT/Rumble content creators may be media, but it is not journalism. Among the Europeans the difference is clear without any need for explanation, but in USA hardly anyone is able to understand the difference. Even after exhaustive explanation many people say they are “not convinced” as if idiots’ conviction or lack of it should matter.
Not in the same true/false black and white way you were implying.
You make my point, that it is not at all difficult to create false impressions, to misrepresent in non-verbal ways, without ever telling an untruth. Politicians live on half-truths. The crowd size presented really was accurate at the time it was shot. They just didn’t tell you when that was. And Noem really did say what they taped her saying, they just didn’t tell you she was joking. Half truths are misleading without being technically false.
I’m going to call bullshit on this one. The principle is very different. Consider the following statements:
-I promise/promised to bring prices down
-I’m working to bring prices down
-Prices will soon come down
-The price of xxx has come down
Not a single one of these statements is false. Together, they create a positive impression about prices. They can all be equally true when prices are generally rising or generally falling.
You are claiming that your critical thinking skills can somehow quantify the degree of spin and misdirection being used short of actually lying. The implication is that you could ask some large number of people about their impressions and support for the person/media outlet presenting the material, get the usual wide distribution of impressions, and somehow draw a line on that scatter plot and say “everyone to the right of this line is a gullible fool who didn’t apply critical thinking”. Which is indistinguishable from “these people disagree with me.” When the glass is half full, it really is also half empty.
Erik:
In the context of this discussion, I don’t see why it should matter. Journalists are capable of saying things that are true and things that are false, and so are non-journalists. Both can be fact-checked.
I’m not arguing that every source is equally credible, obviously, but what I’m trying to get across to Bill is that even if a source is unreliable, it doesn’t mean that everything that source says is false. “The Washington Post is a left-leaning propaganda outlet, therefore their database doesn’t show that Trump is a liar” would be a fallacious argument even if the premise were true. Whether their claims are true depends on the content of those claims and not on the fact that it’s the WaPo that’s making them.
Bill’s MO during this months-long discussion has been to (try to) discredit any source of negative info about his Dear Leader and then use that as an excuse for dismissing everything that source says, whether true or false. It’s a perfect way of insulating himself from the truth, and it’s a necessary tactic for him since he can’t defend Trump on the merits. Poisoning the well is his only option, but unfortunately for him, he’s as bad at that as he is at defending Trump.
If he wants to discredit the WaPo database, he needs to show that the things it says are false. Vague characterizations of the Post as “a known Trump hating left leaning news outlet” or of the database as “propaganda” won’t cut it. Whether entry number 8,722 in that database is true or false depends only on the content of that entry and not on Bill’s opinion of the Washington Post.
Flint:
Deliberately creating a false impression is just as dishonest as telling an overt lie, and as consumers of information we need to be wary of both.
Right. They were trying to create a false impression. By not relying on that single source, I was able to learn the truth about the crowd size at that rally.
And as consumers of information, we want to avoid being misled as much as we want to avoid believing lies. The goal in both cases is to arrive at the truth.
keiths:
Flint:
My guess is that if Trump made those statements, your approach to them would be similar to mine:
“I promise to bring prices down” — That statement itself is a promise, so it’s self-validating. He is promising to bring prices down. Whether he’ll succeed is a separate question.
“I promised to bring prices down” — If he says that, he’s telling the truth. We heard him make that promise over and over during the campaign.
“I’m working to bring prices down” — That one’s mostly false. He’s certainly working to convince us that prices are down, but he’s doing very little to actually bring them down. The only things I can think of are that he’s trying to import more Argentinian beef and he’s reduced some of the tariffs on food.
“Prices will soon come down” — If he says that, the immediate question is “Is there any good reason to believe him?” For prices to come down would require deflation, which is highly unlikely and would be dangerous to boot. Even if we interpret him as meaning that inflation will come down, not prices, there’s little reason to believe him. His tariff policy is inflationary, we’re 11 months into his presidency with inflation exactly where it was when he took office, and he’s presented no plausible ideas for actually bringing prices down.
“The price of xxx has come down” — That’s a factual claim which we can check if pricing data is available for xxx.
If Trump made all those statements, my impression (and yours too, I assume) would not be positive, even if that were Trump’s intention.
No, I’m claiming that critical thinking skills can be used to avoid false impressions, just as they are used to avoid falling for lies.
I have no idea how you inferred that from anything I’ve written. Some questions are clear-cut and others aren’t.
Are you arguing that impressions can never be correct or incorrect? If someone is under the impression that Trump is honest, it isn’t simply “these people disagree with me”. It’s “these people are wrong, and here’s why:”. Hence this thread.
It matters. Journalists are required to fact-check their own reporting. Entertainment/infotainment podcasters like Tim Pool and Alex Jones are not required to do that.
In USA the situation is much worse than this: Many people think Tim Pool and Alex Jones are actually journalists, or that journalists are either no better or are far worse than Tim Pool and Alex Jones. And then there are people like you who think that the difference does not matter.
The difference is this: You are either getting actual information from a trustworthy journalistic source or you are getting stuff said that you’d need to fact-check and verify, but when you cannot tell journalists apart from non-journalists, then you also cannot tell whether you need to start verifying or not. And also very likely you have no idea how to verify anything at all, because you’d basically need to be a journalist for that, but you do not know what a journalist is, so…
Erik:
If you’re arguing that we don’t need to fact-check journalists, then you’re making a similar mistake to colewd’s. Journalists can be wrong, and they can be biased, so we can’t blindly trust everything they say. The flip side is that even nutjobs like Alex Jones aren’t wrong about everything. Some of what they say is true, so to doubt every single statement of Jones based on his unreliability would be a mistake.
Time is limited, and we’re not going to fact-check every statement we see, of course. We’re less likely to fact-check a claim in a BBC article than we are if Joe Rogan makes the same claim, and that makes sense. I’m just arguing that we shouldn’t blindly trust the BBC despite its good reputation, and we shouldn’t blindly distrust Joe Rogan despite the fact that he’s goofy and has a tendency to fall for conspiracy theories.
Journalists are the only people who know how to verify claims? Come on, Erik.
Jock:
It’s funny you mention that, because I too have been thinking of Trump as a lab rat. I was trying to figure out why Trump would lie about bringing prices down when it’s obvious that they’re up. Who does he think he’s fooling (besides cult members like Bill)? People have eyes. Why tell a lie that your audience absolutely knows is false?
Then it occurred to me: Trump is a lab rat. The rat presses a lever and gets a food reward. This happens over and over. Put that hungry rat in a cage and it’s going to immediately run over to the lever and press it. If at some point the food pellets stop coming, the rat will keep pressing the lever, even more frantically than before.
Trump tells a lie and gets rewarded for it. This has been happening for his entire life. Put him in a new situation, and he will immediately lie. It’s a reflex. Now that he’s in trouble over affordability, his instinct is to press that lever: lie, lie, lie, ever more frantically, even though it isn’t working.
keiths,
Yes. I think Trump went for truthiness before Colbert ever coined the term in 2005. I suspect that he genuinely believes that if he makes a statement, that it then becomes true. Waaay back in 2007 when Trump was only defrauding banks and investors, rather than the American public, he claimed under oath that the value of some of his assets depended on how he, DJT, about those assets:
Hence Bill’s belief that he is not “lying”; rather, he is mentally ill, and has been for at least 20 years.
In politology this is called aspirational mindset (/vision/attitude/speech etc). The basic idea is that things are complicated to spell out in accurate detail, so shortcuts must be taken in speech, and a way to do it is to state how you want things to be, to sloganeer your goals. Moreover, politicians make policies about things like human rights that are not tangible facts at all but still need to be formulated and talked about (think of speeches against slavery and pro-slavery in Abraham Lincoln era).
You can think about American current situation either aspirationally, i.e. that Trump will be gone soon and institutions and rule of law and due process will find its earlier grooves again; or realistically, i.e. it is now undeniable that the constitutional regime in USA is hardly different from some South American dictatorships… It is probably clear which attitude is more true to facts, but does this necessarily mean it is the better attitude to have, especially as a politician campaigning for a seat?
Of course, with Trump it is different. He is outright lying. However, much of the populace always thought that all or most politicians were always or usually lying, so nothing new there. This is the environment that Trump is abusing to get away with lies and the grossest selfish corruption. In a normal country, this is punishable and would have been punished a very long time ago, instead of being rewarded with presidency.
And if you are arguing that you do not need to know what journalists are – namely that they have professional and ethical standards that include fact-checking themselves – and at the same time you *think* you are somehow able to fact-check anything on your own, then you’re both wrong and deluded, just like colewd. If you do not know what journalism is, then you have failed at getting facts straight about a simple topic – journalism – so there is no hope for you on more complicated topics.
The starting point is very bad for you and colewd, as Americans. The sad fact is that much/most of what people call journalism in USA is not it. Fox News – a so-called mainstream media outlet in USA with News in its name – is not news and not journalism. At the same time, people think all talk radio hosts and political podcasters on YT/Rumble are doing journalism the way it should be done. In this environment, not only do you not know where you could possibly get factual information, you are also unprepared to check facts on your own.
Allan Miller,
I don’t think this type of discussion moves us forward. Politicians spin. This is not an effective vehicle to differentiate them. Donald spins more than Joe so let’s vote for Joe. Yea but Joe can’t string a sentence together and his policies do not pass the common sense sniff test. I guess that spin metric is not so important after all especially given a first pass look its conclusion is not based solely on facts but also on the opinion of a leftist organisation.
colewd,
It’s not about differentiating anyone. It’s about Trump’s lying, specifically. Biden is history. By the looks of it, Trump soon may be too.
The discussion is static because you just refuse to accept any whisper of imperfection. Of course, it takes 2 (sides) to tango: stasis is also favoured by our continuing disbelief that anyone could be quite this obtuse.
Jock:
503 on the day before the 2020 election, according to the WaPo. Frantic lever-pressing.
Erik:
I’m not, of course. All I’m saying is that sources (including journalists) shouldn’t be blindly trusted. They shouldn’t be blindly distrusted, either, as Bill is doing with the Washington Post.
Lol.
It’s a spectrum, not a dichotomy, and a lot of what passes for news in the US is on the crap end of the spectrum. That’s why critical thinking and media literacy are so important. Fox’s erstwhile slogan — “Fair and Balanced” — was inadvertent self-mockery, and anyone who relies on Fox as their primary source of news (as my otherwise intelligent mother did) is making a grave mistake. Anyone who relies solely on the Washington Post is also making a mistake, though a lesser one. Blind trust is a mistake, as is blind distrust.
“People” are not a monolith, and they don’t all agree on who is doing journalism “the way it should be done” and who isn’t.
I have no idea why you think this hypothetical undifferentiated mass of “people” somehow dictates how I consume information, prevents me from knowing where to get factual information, or leaves me unprepared to check facts.
colewd:
That’s because for you, “forward” means “away from criticism of my Dear Leader.”
Politicians spin, they lie, and they spin and lie by vastly differing amounts, which makes it an important way of differentiating them. Honesty matters in a president. It not only reflects their character, it also has a huge impact on their job performance. Trump is a pathological liar, and that has had (and continues to have) disastrous consequences for America.
In any case, this thread is not about differentiating Trump from other politicians, despite your continued efforts at making it so. It’s about Trump’s dishonesty.
The election is over, Trump is no longer a candidate, and the question at hand is how he — Donald Trump himself — is performing as president. The answer isn’t pretty. He sucks, and Americans can see that, which is why his approval rating is down to 36% in the latest poll I saw. His dishonesty is a part of that. How do you think struggling Americans feel about a guy who lies about the fact that they are struggling while he
How do you think Americans feel when that greedy creep lies and tells them that affordability is a Democrat hoax and that prices are down dramatically when everyone can see that they’re actually up, especially those people whose money runs out before the next paycheck arrives? And if prices are down and everything is more affordable, why is he telling people to cut back on their doll and pencil purchases?
We’d love to look at the facts, but you refuse. Everyone knows why.
A couple more lies from Trump’s Pennsylvania rally:
The guy can’t even maintain a coherent lie for two sentences. If the tariffs are making them rich, why do they need a $12 billion bailout?
The tariffs are making them poor and they aren’t happy about it. They’re projected to lose $34 billion this year and the $12 billion bailout only compensates for a third of that. It also doesn’t do anything to solve the fundamental problem. Are we going to keep doing bailout after bailout, indefinitely?
Trump created the problem, and now he’s congratulating himself for his half-assed attempt at fixing it. It’s like punching someone in the face and then patting yourself on the back for handing them an ice pack. And lying about the fact that you punched them in the first place.