As the Trump-era media dances to a new dictionary of falsehood, will we ever “hold these truths” again?

I felt especially drawn to that last assertion. As a tail-end baby boomer (born in 1962) who sputtered to political wakefulness in the Watergate years, I loved the notion of a president (well, future president) with such precocious integrity that, as a child, he could chop down his father’s prized cherry tree and then fess up in full.

The cherry tree story, we now know—along with the bits about Columbus’s “discovery” and the Colonists’ unanimity—is false, the fabrication of a presidential biographer who wanted Washington’s life to become a moral lesson for children.

Enter the Liar-in-Chief

No one would invent such a tale about Donald Trump, the incurious, self-aggrandizing, narcissistic Liar-in-Chief, a man who told Megyn Kelly in 2016 that he doesn’t have time to read books and who, when pressed, said his favorite title was All Quiet on the Western Front, a World War I novel published in 1928 and typically read by middle-schoolers.

Analyses of Trump’s public remarks peg them at a 4th-6th-grade reading level, with simple syntax, uncomplicated vocabulary, and endlessly repeated catch-phrases. He will never reach the speechifying stature of, say, Barack Obama’s 2008 “A More Perfect Union” Philadelphia address on race relations, nor even George H.W. Bush’s oft-quoted “thousand points of light.”

Loath to say lie

But there is one literary achievement future generations can trace directly back to Trump: an expanded, extravagant vocabulary to name what is not true.

During the 2016 election season and Trump’s first term, mainstream news outlets were loath to call a lie a lie; it seemed, well, unseemly to use such a stark word in conjunction with the holder of the country’s highest office.

So journalists turned euphemistic. Trump’s claims were “lacking in evidence.” They were “not fact-based.” Unsubstantiated. Without documentation. Hyperbolic. But like the dodgy passive voice in English (“mistakes were made; collateral damage was incurred”), this terminology elided the question of culpability: Did Trump know he was lying? Was he willfully bending (breaking, trampling) the truth? Did he even know the difference?

In January 2017—I know, a lifetime of lies ago—The New York Times breached the delicate boundary and used the L-word in a headline regarding Trump’s claims about the popular vote (you may recall that Hillary Clinton won it, clinching 48 percent of ballots cast compared to Trump’s 46 percent). Other news organizations, including CNN and The New Yorker, followed suit.

It didn’t stop there—the lies themselves or the effort to characterize the nonstop stream of falsehoods issuing from the president’s mouth, his press briefings, and his social media feeds.

As Trump continued to invent, exaggerate, and misconstrue—about abortion and the economy, about Covid and NATO, about the 2020 election and the January 6 attack on the US Capitol—some journalists waxed poetic: a “firehose of falsehood,” a “bombardment of dishonesty.” The president committed “serial inaccuracy,” like a pyromaniac who just can’t stop lighting matches.

Our new compendia of canards

The phenomenon of a president who lied consistently, emphatically, and recklessly gave rise to a secondary wave of analyses, compendiums, and books.

The Trump Presidency and Executive Power, edited by Charles Lamb and published in 2019, included a chapter called “The Lies of Donald Trump: A Taxonomy”, which distinguished among various types of Trumpian falsehoods: 1) trivial lies, 2) self-aggrandizing lies and exaggerations, 3) lies to deceive the public, and 4) egregious lies.

Wait; what? We have a president whose lies are so frequent and florid that it’s possible to sort them into categories? That chapter could be razor-edged satire…except, it’s not.

A University of Oxford fellow, Heidi Taksdal Skjeseth, published a 2017 paper called “All the President’s Lies: Media Coverage of Lies in the U.S. and France”, noting that during the first 40 days of his first presidency, Trump said something untrue, in public, every day.The Washington Post went further, documenting 30,573 false or misleading claims during Trump’s entire first term, an average of 21 per day. Imagine lying nearly two dozen times a day, every day, for four years. Wouldn’t your tongue ache? Wouldn’t your conscience twang?

Lie, deny, repeat

The Post’s fact-checker created a new category of falsehoods dubbed the “Bottomless Pinocchio” for lies repeated at least 20 times; Trump was the only politician who met the category’s standard. Other pundits mused on whether Trump’s statements were technically lies, in which the teller is aware of the truth and attempting to hide or elide it, or bullshit, in which the teller just doesn’t care.

I vote for bullshit. Remember Trump’s advice to press secretary Stephanie Grisham: “As long as you keep repeating something, it doesn’t matter what you say.”

Not close to accurate. Uncorroborated. Baseless. Implausible. Evidence-free.

CNN noted on May 23 that the president had “delivered a dizzying variety of false claims in his public remarks over the past week,” then listed 28 of those statements, each one duly fact-checked and debunked:

• “We had inflation, but we’ve got that down.” Um, no; the most recent inflation rate, 3.8 percent in April, was the highest since May 2023
  
  
• “Factory construction is up.” Nah; total spending on manufacturing construction was down.
  
  
• “We’re the only country in the world that’s doing mail-in ballots.” Sure, if you don’t count Canada, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

We hold these truths?

The danger here isn’t that we stop believing Donald Trump. The danger is that, aswirl in so much deception, we stop believing anything.

I think about the Declaration whose anniversary we are about to mark. It’s a work in progress, that document, with so much that’s blinkered, contradictory, or simply absent. But on the cusp of the Semiquincentennial, one phrase sings clear: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

Dial back 250 years. The framers believed in some facts so universal they could be declared self-evident. They could be held. Collectively. Not just by you or me. By we.

In a world of deepfakes, disinformation and—yes, lies—that’s a dream not yet come true.

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