If by chance you were hopeful that Donald Trump and his team would miraculously morph into honest people after he was inaugurated, the past few days provided a rude awakening. The administration’s actions were so rude, underhanded and patently unethical, that they shocked even me — a full-time Trump critic.
The lies started just 24 hours into Trump’s presidency. I am choosing to use the word “lies” here because we must call a lie a lie. When we call a downright lie something other than that — like “an inaccurate statement,” or an “error,” or even a “falsehood” — we fail in our fundamental duty as citizens to hold our leaders accountable. This weekend, Donald Trump, his Press Secretary Sean Spicer, and White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway each looked us all right in the face and told stone-cold lies.
It started with Donald Trump. Speaking before the CIA, in front of a wall honoring fallen officers, he lied when he said that it was the media that completely concocted a beef between himself and the CIA. In fact, it was Donald Trump who compared them to Nazi’s and put quotation marks around the word “intelligence” when speaking about the intelligence community. Instead of apologizing or even creatively avoiding the awkwardness of his own mistakes in the name of simply looking ahead, Trump lied. Of course, the intelligence employees know that, but the fact that he was willing, in his first full day in office, to stand up on the microphone and lie like that was breathtaking. Either he actually believes his own lies, which would be troubling, or he simply lacks such a moral core that his standing up before the nation and lying to everybody just doesn’t bother him. Either way, it’s problematic. Any pretense that the gravity of the moment or the im portance of the position would humble him in any way has now been thrown out the window. Donald is Donald and Donald is a liar.
A few hours later, Press Secretary Sean Spicer held an angry, impromptu press briefing — two days before his first scheduled press conference. This, it appeared, was an emergency. Except it wasn’t. Spicer, who eventually stormed off without taking a single question, stated over and over and over again that Donald Trump’s inauguration was the largest inauguration in American history. Except it wasn’t. The non-partisan fact-checker Politifact evaluated every word that came out of Spicer’s mouth and deemed his statement that it was “the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period” to be a “pants on fire” lie — the worst rating a statement can receive from the organization. Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration was the largest in American history, but it appears that Obama’s 2013 inauguration and even Clinton’s in 1993 were each larger than Trump’s.
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Pressed on this lie in his first official press conference on Monday, Spicer did not relent. Instead, he pivoted to how many people viewed the inauguration on Facebook, Twitter, streaming news services and mobile tablets. On Saturday, his entire conversation was about how many people were in physical attendance for the inauguration, but now he’s talking about tablets and cell phones. Instead of genuinely acknowledging that he misspoke on Saturday, and that they did not have the largest crowd ever on hand, he simply pivoted to a different type of viewership.
Facts don’t seem to matter to Sean Spicer. In one breath he said official numbers were not yet in, but in the next breath he boldly declared that the event the day prior was undoubtedly the largest ever, which it wasn’t.
This is not an opinion. Either it was the largest crowd ever assembled for an inauguration or it wasn’t. That’s not an editorial decision — it’s math. It was not the largest crowd ever for an inauguration — period. That he felt it necessary to call an emergency press conference to press such a lie says everything we need to know about him and the Trump White House. They are petty and will lie right in your face if they feel slighted in any way.
The following day, presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway made her rounds on the Sunday morning news circuit. What she said to Chuck Todd on “Meet The Press” will never be forgotten. When Todd pushed her on Spicer’s repeated lies and mistruths, Conway first threatened to end the White House’s relationship with either “NBC” or “Meet the Press” over Todd’s persistence, then she dropped a bomb of epic proportions.
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Kellyanne Conway said that Sean Spicer relied on “alternative facts” for his conclusion that Trump’s inauguration was the largest ever. Todd, as you could imagine, was gobsmacked at the reply. What the hell are “alternative facts?” Whether Conway made that up right then and there is unclear, but what is clear is that the White House is not guided by honesty and integrity.
By introducing the concept of “alternative facts,” what we have here is the troubling, frightening normalization of dishonesty. This is not Conway’s first time telling us to stop believing our lying eyes. She pulled this same stunt when Trump clearly and obviously mocked a disabled reporter. Instead of acknowledging and apologizing for it, she told us that we should instead “look into Trump’s heart.” In other words, she was telling us then that she had “alternative facts” that we weren’t privy to. What our eyes saw and what our ears heard meant nothing because Conway knows Trump’s heart.
She wasn’t done, though. Appearing later that morning on ABC, Conway declared that the official position of the Trump White House was that he was never going to release his tax returns — going back on a promise he repeatedly made that he would release the returns once an audit was complete. On Monday she flipped back to the previous statement that Trump would release the tax returns when the audit was done.
They are liars. And now they run our country.
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