The inability to bite his tongue is the second-worst trait any president can have when he’s trying to make deals on behalf of the American people. The worst is dishonesty.
Big Little Lies
Fact-checking is an important function in any White House. Before draft remarks ever hit the paper, ideas are discussed in staff meetings and vetted. Perhaps it’s a speech about space travel. A data call goes out to different offices and agencies looking for facts to build around a core narrative. Then a speechwriter takes a first pass. It gets farmed out to policy experts to make sure it’s consistent with administration policy. A second draft is made before it’s passed to an internal fact-checker to independently confirm each detail. Then aides read it again, including maybe the chief of staff, before it goes to the president or vice president for final review.
This is what happened in March 2019 when Vice President Mike Pence made a rousing speech about the US space program in Huntsville, Alabama. NASA helped supply the facts in order to craft a big announcement. “At the direction of the president of the United States,” Pence declared, “it is the stated policy of this administration to return American astronauts to the moon within the next five years. The first woman and the next man on the moon will both be American astronauts, launched by American rockets, from American soil!” The crowd was ecstatic.
You know what happened next. It’s the twist in every Trump story that we all hope never comes but always does. The president stepped in, made a statement that no one fact-checked beforehand, and screwed it up. A few weeks after the Pence speech, Trump tweeted, “For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon - We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!” First, the tweet was misleading. The president himself had approved NASA’s lunar plans; he was acting as if he hadn’t. Some of us speculated it was because the moon wasn’t big enough for him. Second, he made the very scientifically inaccurate claim that the moon is a part of Mars, despite being separated by nearly fifty million miles. Pence’s staff, a bit befuddled, flagged the tweet internally to ensure someone corrected Trump. “There’s no need to go to Mars,” one aide messaged. “We’re already on it!”
Earlier, we touched briefly upon President Trump’s tenuous relationship with the truth. He makes outlandish claims, is drawn to conspiracy theories, and regularly spreads half-truths and demonstrably false information. That was not news to anyone when he joined the presidential race. Trump has been prone to misstatements for as long as he’s been in the public eye. His family members laugh it off as harmless. Everyone knows it’s his “style,” they say, so what’s the big deal? When it’s bad facts about the solar system, they’re right. It’s harmless and even comical, but it’s worse when it’s a disproven claim that “millions” of people voted illegally in a national election.
The problem is that people believe what he says because he’s the president, and Trump regularly—frequently—spreads false information that large majorities of the country accept as the truth. I will be the first to say that political opponents have clouded our ability to judge the president’s statements fairly because they have a knee-jerk reaction to everything he says. To them, it’s all a lie. That’s not accurate. Everything the president says is not a lie, but an awful lot of it is.
A Washington Post analysis found that after nearly nine hundred days in the White House, the president made a staggering eleven thousand junk claims. This averages out to more than ten half-truths or untruths a day. While some Americans have grown skeptical of a media that seems to attack President Trump relentlessly, this figure is based on objective analysis of his own words, words that can be proven inaccurate or flat-out wrong.
You can randomly search the databases of his claims and find everything from easily dismissed white lies (“I’m running the best economy in our history”) to obvious whoppers (“I won the popular vote”). The president has repeatedly claimed he got NATO countries to spend $100 billion more on the alliance’s defense. This is false. Countries were increasing their defense expenditures before Trump took office, and the increases are less than half of his claim. The president also said violent crime was surging in the two years before he took office—with murders up “by more than 20 percent”—and that he’s brought crime down, even though two years before he was inaugurated the violent crime rate was at one of its lowest points in forty-five years. The list goes on and on.
The president’s falsehoods are especially problematic when they change public attitudes. Misstating defense budgets and crime statistics is one thing. Every president slips up. But convincing the masses to share the absurd views we’ve discussed—that his opponents are actual criminals, that the FBI is corrupt, and that the judicial system is rigged—is far more consequential, with real-world social implications. You, the reader, might be more enlightened and dismiss these statements when you hear them, yet millions of people accept them as fact, changing the way they engage in politics.
The president has been called a pathological liar. I used to cringe when I heard people say that just to score political points, and I thought it was unfair. Now I know it’s true. He spreads lies he hears. He makes up new lies to spread. He lies to our faces. He asks people around him to lie. People who’ve known him for years accept it as common knowledge. We cannot get used to this. Think of what we must “trust” a president to do as our chief executive. That’s why we spent the beginning of this book assessing character, because it is so critical for our commander in chief to have it.
His appointees have the humiliating chore of defending him when he’s wrong. If he says something false, he asks us to spin it closer to the truth. Advisors try to avoid admitting Trump was “wrong,” and hilariously, this creates a second round of misleading statements, as aides create new lies about the president’s old lies in order to bring them more in line with the facts. The ripple effect of excuses actually distorts reality. Because it’s too confusing to follow, it’s easier for people to either accept what the president said in the first place, or not. In the meantime, the truth lies unconscious and bleeding in a ditch along the side of the road.
President Trump is fundamentally undermining our perceptions of “truth.” He has taken us down a dark, subjectivist rabbit hole. To him, there is no real truth. If people believe something is true, that makes it true. A scientist will tell you a tree is a tree. It cannot be both a tree and a sheep at the same time. Not for the president. A tree is only a tree to him if we all agree it is. If he can convince us it’s a sheep, then it is a sheep!
Kellyanne Conway unintentionally summed up this Trumpian philosophy beautifully. She went on Meet the Press and was forced to defend the president’s absurd boast about having the largest ever crowd at his inauguration. To be clear, the president’s claim was easily disproven by facts and photographs and numbers and recorded history and basic human reasoning. Still, Chuck Todd pressed Conway on the subject, to which she responded: “You’re saying it’s a falsehood… [but] Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts.”