Lakhota
Diamond Member
Historians see in Trump the biggest liar in presidential politics. Ever.
WASHINGTON – Win or lose this November, Donald Trump is headed for the record books regardless, presidential historians say, albeit with an admittedly dubious achievement: the most falsehood-prone candidate in the two centuries of the republic.
“In American history, we’ve never had a major presidential candidate who fabricated facts with the regularity of Donald Trump,” said Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University. “He just simply makes up things.”
In the span of a few days last week, Trump falsely claimed that the NFL had sent him a letter complaining about this autumn’s debate schedule, when in fact it had not. He claimed that the Koch brothers had tried to meet with him about offering their support, when in reality they had no interest in doing so. And, most astonishingly, he claimed he had seen a video showing hundreds of millions of dollars being unloaded from a plane in Iran, fabricating embellishments about the video’s provenance, even after his campaign conceded that no such video existed.
Theda Skocpol, a government and sociology professor at Harvard, agreed that Trump’s dishonesties have set a new standard. “Trump lies constantly and shamelessly. I do think he is in new territory,” she said.
GOP leaders trying to attack Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton over her problems with honesty, meanwhile, are growing increasingly frustrated with their own candidate’s near-daily false statements. “What can I say? We nominated a fabulist,” said one top Republican official privately. “There’s no defending that.”
Trump’s willingness to say things that are provably untrue, of course, is not something that began with his campaign. The 70-year-old has been known for his exaggerations and outright fabrications for decades.
When he bought the Eastern Airlines Washington-to-New York shuttle in 1989 and renamed it Trump Airlines, he claimed, without any facts, that the other carrier operating that route did not maintain its planes as well as he did.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, he claimed stakes in properties in which he had no ownership interest, but was merely licensing the use of his name or was in line to collect a percentage of future profits. When confronted by lawyers in a 2007 deposition about this, he at first insisted that he was correct, but then replied that not having ownership was actually smarter because it was not possible for him to lose any money should the investment tank.
In 1991, at the age of 45, he invented a pseudonym for himself, called a gossip columnist and told her that “his boss,” Donald Trump, was dating Italian model Carla Bruni, when in fact he’d met her only once, a year earlier.
Last summer, in the early stages of his campaign, he told a Rolling Stone reporter riding aboard his private jetliner that it was larger than Air Force One – even though his Boeing 757 is nowhere near the size of the modified 747 used by the president.
And this spring – still stinging from former GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s speech ridiculing his various failed branded businesses – Trump pointed to a table of raw steaks and declared them “Trump Steaks,” even though that product has not been available for close to a decade.
A Republican consultant close to the Trump campaign, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said Trump’s behavior is typical among wealthy candidates he has worked with.
“All those years in public life, nobody cared about the veracity of statements they made outside their business, which is the only place truth matters to them,” the consultant said. “Many people ― close staff, family ― let him go on about things for years and just roll their eyes, some afraid to say, ‘Stop it.’ Because it’s a sideshow, doesn’t matter. Then, suddenly, it matters. But the habit is there, set in stone.”
Much More: The Party Of Honest Abe Now Stuck With Dishonest Don
I'm 69 - and Trump is definitely the biggest liar I've ever seen. He does it with impunity - even on things that are easily proven false. I can easily imagine him telling people it's day instead of night.
WASHINGTON – Win or lose this November, Donald Trump is headed for the record books regardless, presidential historians say, albeit with an admittedly dubious achievement: the most falsehood-prone candidate in the two centuries of the republic.
“In American history, we’ve never had a major presidential candidate who fabricated facts with the regularity of Donald Trump,” said Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University. “He just simply makes up things.”
In the span of a few days last week, Trump falsely claimed that the NFL had sent him a letter complaining about this autumn’s debate schedule, when in fact it had not. He claimed that the Koch brothers had tried to meet with him about offering their support, when in reality they had no interest in doing so. And, most astonishingly, he claimed he had seen a video showing hundreds of millions of dollars being unloaded from a plane in Iran, fabricating embellishments about the video’s provenance, even after his campaign conceded that no such video existed.
Theda Skocpol, a government and sociology professor at Harvard, agreed that Trump’s dishonesties have set a new standard. “Trump lies constantly and shamelessly. I do think he is in new territory,” she said.
GOP leaders trying to attack Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton over her problems with honesty, meanwhile, are growing increasingly frustrated with their own candidate’s near-daily false statements. “What can I say? We nominated a fabulist,” said one top Republican official privately. “There’s no defending that.”
Trump’s willingness to say things that are provably untrue, of course, is not something that began with his campaign. The 70-year-old has been known for his exaggerations and outright fabrications for decades.
When he bought the Eastern Airlines Washington-to-New York shuttle in 1989 and renamed it Trump Airlines, he claimed, without any facts, that the other carrier operating that route did not maintain its planes as well as he did.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, he claimed stakes in properties in which he had no ownership interest, but was merely licensing the use of his name or was in line to collect a percentage of future profits. When confronted by lawyers in a 2007 deposition about this, he at first insisted that he was correct, but then replied that not having ownership was actually smarter because it was not possible for him to lose any money should the investment tank.
In 1991, at the age of 45, he invented a pseudonym for himself, called a gossip columnist and told her that “his boss,” Donald Trump, was dating Italian model Carla Bruni, when in fact he’d met her only once, a year earlier.
Last summer, in the early stages of his campaign, he told a Rolling Stone reporter riding aboard his private jetliner that it was larger than Air Force One – even though his Boeing 757 is nowhere near the size of the modified 747 used by the president.
And this spring – still stinging from former GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s speech ridiculing his various failed branded businesses – Trump pointed to a table of raw steaks and declared them “Trump Steaks,” even though that product has not been available for close to a decade.
A Republican consultant close to the Trump campaign, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said Trump’s behavior is typical among wealthy candidates he has worked with.
“All those years in public life, nobody cared about the veracity of statements they made outside their business, which is the only place truth matters to them,” the consultant said. “Many people ― close staff, family ― let him go on about things for years and just roll their eyes, some afraid to say, ‘Stop it.’ Because it’s a sideshow, doesn’t matter. Then, suddenly, it matters. But the habit is there, set in stone.”
Much More: The Party Of Honest Abe Now Stuck With Dishonest Don
I'm 69 - and Trump is definitely the biggest liar I've ever seen. He does it with impunity - even on things that are easily proven false. I can easily imagine him telling people it's day instead of night.
