But once the highly-trusted Walter Cronkite told the American people that the war was unwinnable, Johnson knew that his lying was obvious, and he knew that he had lost credibility and did not run for re-election. Lyndon Johnson lied constantly to the American people about how the United States was winning the Vietnam War. This makes Trump different than most of our well-known liar US presidents. Trump is not extraordinary in the sense that he believes he is above the law-that’s par for the course for most US presidents-but he is extraordinary in his belief that there are no consequences for being caught lying. Trump’s arrogance has been, in a perverse sense, justified. What also distinguishes Trump as a liar compared to other liar US presidents is that Trump is unbothered by the consequences of being caught lying. The Trump combination of being both an unrelentingly self-serving liar and a poor judge of what in fact is self-serving creates a unique kind of uncertainty. We can always count on Trump to have regard only for himself and to have no regard for the truth, but part of what makes him especially anxiety producing is that we can’t count on him to be smart enough to know what falsehood will in fact be self-serving. That’s what the bottom line is.” Even Trump supporters-who believe that all news that Trump doesn’t like is “fake news” -had themselves experienced or had heard from family and friends that Trump’s COVID-19 test availability assertion was false. One of many examples of this child-like lying occurred on March 7, 2020, when Trump stated about COVID-19 testing, “Anybody that wants a test can get a test. Trump is no different than the five-year old with chocolate cake smeared all over his face who, when confronted by his parents for eating his brother’s last piece of birthday chocolate cake, tells his parents that he has never had chocolate cake in his life. For some psychiatrists, assertions that are “easily verifiable to be untrue” indicate a pathological liar, but for me, it just means that Trump is a child-like liar. In addition to the sheer number of lies, what makes Trump extraordinary is his striking incapacity to gage how easily and quickly his lies will be detected. “ President Trump Made 16,241 False or Misleading Claims in His First Three Years” was the headline of the Washington Post in January 2020, which reports, “He averaged six such claims a day in 2017, nearly 16 a day in 2018 and more than 22 a day in 2019.” This was before his 2020 epidemic of false and misleading claims around COVID-19. The most obvious area of Trump’s extraordinariness as a liar is his staggering number of lies. Trump is obviously not the first politician to have zero allegiance to the truth, but he remains extraordinary-not merely in the sheer quantity of his lies but also in other ways. But first, some of what makes Trump an exceptional and extraordinary liar, even for a US president. I’ll get to Biden-whose lies, not his gaffes, are what the Blue Team should worry most about. While Bernie’s diagnosis of Trump is a politically safe one, a more uncomfortable assessment for him would be: What type of liar is Joe Biden? And so, Bernie knows that it is in no way radical to use this term to describe the unrelentingly self-serving Trump who unhesitatingly lies if he judges it to be in his self-interest. Photograph Source: Matt Johnson – CC BY 2.0īernie Sanders has routinely called Trump a “pathological liar.” The term pathological liar, a controversial one for psychiatrists, in common usage coveys someone who is an extraordinarily unrestrained liar.
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