Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead
President Donald J. Trump, joined by Vice President Mike Pence, displays his signed Executive Order for the Establishment of a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, Thursday, May 11, 2017, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C.
One of the most significant events of Donald Trump’s presidency occurred just two days after his inauguration and seemed trivial at the time. It immediately exposed the fundamental dishonesty of the new president and predicted Trump’s corrupt actions and his barrage of lies ever since leading directly to his historic impeachment this week by the U.S. House of Representatives.
The event was spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway announcing on “Meet the Press” Trump’s presidency intended to embrace “alternative facts.” Host Chuck Todd had asked her why Trump destroyed the credibility of his press secretary, Sean Spicer, by requiring him “to utter a provable falsehood” about something so petty as the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration. Spicer’s declaration: “This was the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration—period!”
That was clearly refuted by aerial photographs of the crowds on the Washington mall during the inaugurations of Trump and Barack Obama. Because the monumentally egotistical Trump bragged everything he did was the greatest ever, Conway wasn’t free to admit the lie. “Don’t be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck,” she said. “You’re saying it’s a falsehood… Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that.”
Todd responded appropriately. “Alternative facts?! Alternative facts?! Four of the five facts [Spicer] uttered were just not true. Look, alternative facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods.” For several weeks after that, “alternative facts” were a running joke in the media. But Trump soon said something else preposterous, and the catchphrase faded into history.
Outright Lies
Three years later, the joke’s on America. Trump’s enormous gusher of “alternative facts,” better known as outright lies, is about to surpass 15,000 “false or misleading statements” by year’s end, according to The Washington Post’s database. That isn’t normal. It isn’t what every other politician has always done before Trump. All politicians use exaggeration and hyperbole to put their own actions in the best possible light. Ronald Reagan often repeated fictional urban legends he appeared to believe, but whenever he made provable factual errors, his White House press office would issue corrections.
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Glenn Kessler, The Post’s lead fact-checker, wrote of Trump: “The president is a serial exaggerator without parallel in U.S. politics. He not only consistently makes false claims but also repeats them, in some cases hundreds of time, even though they have been proved wrong.”
There’s never been a president who lies as constantly and as wildly as Trump does. Other Republican officials repeat his fabrications because the president insists upon it. Republican congressmen and senators aren’t allowed to say Trump extorting Ukraine’s president to investigate one of the president’s political opponents in exchange for $400 million in U.S. military aid was wrong. They have to agree with Trump’s absurd claim his call to President Volodymyr Zelensky was “perfect.” Rightwing Republicans are even helping Trump spread fraudulent Russian propaganda created by Vladimir Putin claiming it could have been Ukraine, instead of Russia, that interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Looking Ridiculous
Republicans look ridiculous echoing Trump’s “alternative facts.” Under questioning from an opposing Democratic lawyer, Steve Castor, the lawyer Republicans hired to make the party’s case against impeachment, claimed he had no idea whether Joe Biden was a leading Democratic candidate running against Trump or whether Ukraine announcing a criminal investigation into Biden would damage him politically. Castor even denied the White House transcript quoting Trump telling Ukrainian President Zelensky to “look into” Biden meant Trump wanted Zelensky to look into Biden. Castor said those words were “ambiguous.”
Wisconsin’s retiring Republican Congressman F. James Sensenbrenner used his televised moment on the House Judiciary Committee to engage in some Trumpian political name-calling of his own. Sensenbrenner said that, as a teenager getting involved in politics, he met Wisconsin Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Sensenbrenner accused Democrats of McCarthyism for examining telephone records between a Republican congressional leader and figures directly involved in Trump’s actions against Ukraine, including Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and an indicted Giuliani associate. “Folks, you have made Joe McCarthy look like a piker with what you’ve done with the electronic surveillance,” Sensenbrenner said.
McCarthy was a disgraceful politician, but he never committed any electronic surveillance. Many historians, including Jon Meacham, compare the shameful 1950s McCarthy Era to Trump’s world of “alternative facts.” McCarthy made wild, unfounded charges about large numbers of communist agents in President Dwight Eisenhower’s State Department. A real national witch hunt was unleashed questioning the patriotism of Americans engaged in progressive causes, including the civil rights and the anti-war movements. It led to the firing and blacklisting of thousands of government employees, actors, directors, screenwriters and other popular entertainers and teachers from kindergarten through college.
McCarthy’s chief counsel was Roy Cohn, an unethical, ultimately disbarred New York attorney who also served as a mentor for young Donald Trump’s business career. Cohn is credited with developing Trump’s ruthless tactics of brutally smearing anyone who opposes anything he wants to do with “alternative facts.”
