Truth, justice and the American way

Last Tuesday night, the President of the United States held a campaign rally in Nashville, Tenn. Well—not a campaign rally, exactly: Trump’s next election is two years and five months away. Heavily orchestrated rallies like this one are held, according to many members of Trump’s own inner circle, to boost the President’s ego. You see, after he was elected and forced to spend most of his time in the White House, Trump realized that he missed the adoring, fawning crowds from the campaign trail, who answered all his canned questions the right way, screamed “Lock her up!” at the right times, and generally ate up his fact-free, race-baiting rants. So his staff have basically replicated the rallies to boost our poor Commander-in-Chief’s spirits.

And what does Trump do at these rallies? It’s quite simple: He lies. Almost constantly. While his beloved Twitter account is devoted almost entirely to whining lies about how badly he is being treated by virtually everybody else, the campaign-rally lies are more of the broken-record type: facts and figures either wildly exaggerated or just made up on the spot, old lies from previous rallies that worked well with crowds then, so why not trot them out again, and easily disproven boasts and attacks that Trump simply feels will rile up people and stoke their hatred.

As to those circumspect souls out there noting that “all politicians lie”: While this is almost surely true in a technical sense, I’m not talking here about exaggerating the truth, or picking the friendliest set of facts, or emphasizing the best of all possible outcomes, which are common to most politicians, public figures, toddlers, husbands and wives; I’m talking about lying through your teeth and making things up on the spot just to stoke a crowd, which is something that Trump categorically does more than any other politician in the history of our country.

After opening his Nashville speech by telling the crowd that he loves country music, he went on to claim that “people are saying” that he’s the only politician that “produced more than I said I was going to produce.” Trump used to say this second part at rallies all the time, but more recently he’s added his favorite weasel-like preface: “People are saying.” What people? Oh, you know, just “people.” It’s a masterpiece of slippery, fact-free rhetoric. Try it out on your friends and family: “People are saying that I’m the best-looking person in the county.” “People are saying that you’re going to be picking up the tab for the rest of the night.” You get the idea.

Then on to the usual attack on the press—scores of which were in attendance at this rally. It’s thanks to these people—the press—that the world knows that Trump actually had a rally. Trump’s favorite thing is to attack them to their face when they’re surrounded by thousands of his fans, many of whom have taken to yelling and swearing at the reporters, who are generally held inside a roped-off corral and whose professional ethics and general sense of right and wrong prevent them from responding in kind. Trump: “They’re fake. They are FAKE! LOOK HOW MANY OF THEM! Fake news.” The crowd boos the press. (60 Minutes correspondent Leslie Stahl recently spoke about a conversation she had with Trump two years ago: When she asked him why he constantly insulted journalists, he responded, “You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”)

Then back to his accomplishments: Even his “enemies,” Trump says, are admitting that no President has accomplished more than he has in the first year and a half of his administration. In fact, Trump has signed exactly one bill of any note: He signed the tax-cut bill that the Republican Congress pushed through, which cut the top tax rate that corporations pay from 35 percent to 21 percent. (Of course, by the White House’s own numbers the bill also adds $2.3 trillion dollars to the federal deficit—but that line doesn’t work so well with crowds, so don’t expect to hear much about it.)

His next line: “Nobody would have believed me if I’d have promised there’d be 3.3 million jobs added” in the 18 months between election day and right now, Trump boasted. (During the previous 18-month period, under President Obama, 3.9 million jobs were added.)

Next up: Wages, Trump says, are “finally going up,” for “the first time in many, many years. (Wages have been rising since 2014—our current growth pace, 2.6 percent, is lower than the pace during Obama’s last month in office, which was 2.7 percent.)

Finally, the big whopper: illegal immigration. “We have borders down 40 percent” Trump says, to wild cheers from the crowd. What Trump can’t tell them, of course—because his whole campaign and his whole administration are centered around lying about this—is that border crossings into the U.S. are up compared to Obama-era levels—and deportations are at their lowest level since 2006.

A few more things you won’t hear at a Trump rally: Gas prices are the highest they’ve been in five years. The stock market is having its worst year since 2011. We’re back to trillion-dollar deficits. Oh, and when the FBI was investigating Hillary two years ago, it was because she was corrupt—but now that the FBI is investigating him, it means that the FBI is corrupt.

It all makes perfect sense, really—that is, if you’re the sort of person who likes being lied to.