The Washington Post painstakingly chronicled 30,573 lies former president Trump told while in office. The number is staggering, yet the American people seem inured to these well-documented facts. From the seemingly innocuous (his bigly inaugural numbers) to the more problematic (I won in a landslide), Trump revved his chronic lying up to 39 lies a day in his last weeks in office.
It’s a page straight out of the Mein Kampf playbook, a technique Goebbels used effectively on the German people – “repeat a lie often enough and it will become the truth.” George Orwell forewarned us in his novel, 1984 – “We can believe the lie until it becomes the truth.”
And then there are those who helped spread the lies – an arsenal of right-wing media parroting the president on morning talk shows, hate radio, right-wing news sources, blogs and social media. And lest we forget the hired guns – the Spicers, Huckabees, McEnanys, Giulianis, Conways, et al., whose jobs it was to spew and spin to dizzying effect, these “alternative facts” to the public.
An overwhelmed and maligned press could simply not keep up, and any well vetted and multiple-sourced bombshell reports were spun as “Fake News.” One disturbing headline replaced another disturbing headline, often within hours. It was mind numbing.
But it wasn’t as much the spreaders as it was the ones who remained silent. The Republican Party – whose members in four years never once called out Trump’s lies for fear of the schoolyard bully, who could, with a single tweet, make their lives miserable and end their political careers – was complicit. Their continued silence is deafening.
Another staggering and disturbing number, besides the nearly half-million dead from Covid-19, Trump’s deadliest lie (“it’s a hoax, we’re rounding the corner, it’s no worse than the flu…”), is that 74 million people still supported and voted for this president, validating Goebbels “Big Lie” theory.
Why so many Americans still choose to believe that Hillary, Oprah, Soros and Tom Hanks are part of a secret Satan-worshipping, cannibalistic cabal of liberal, socialist pedophiles and that Donald Trump would expose this global sex trafficking ring is beyond anything this mind can even start to comprehend.
Most politicians lie or exaggerate, even presidents. But Trump has taken it to stratospheric levels never before seen. Imagine Obama, Hillary, and now Joe Biden mouthing just a tiny fraction of Trump’s BS. Hannity and company are salivating in the wings, impatiently waiting for President Biden’s first gaffe or exaggeration.
As a kid growing up in Canada we were awed, intimidated and proud of our neighbor to the south. The George Washington “chopping down the cherry tree” myth is as much embedded into the Canadian psyche as the American.
So how did this nation, 44 presidents later, go from “I cannot tell a lie” to more than 30,000 in a single term?
And how do we go back?
John Rankine