Presidential Lies

President Trump has not uttered the type of big presidential lie that Woodrow Wilson told when he used the campaign slogan he kept us out of war in 1916, knowing full well that he had already secretly committed American entry into World War I after the election.  Or FDR’s big lie of 1940: I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.  Or Obama: If you like your healthcare, you can keep your healthcare.

Trump also doesn’t seem to favor the pathological type of lying typified by the Clinton’s who wove a virtual parallel existence even in their own fecund imaginations, a double life by which the virtuous outer face covers a life of corruption. Their lies were covered up by the sponsors they dutifully served, the liberal establishment. Those who live those types of all-pervasive lies often communicate in a style of prevarication and sophistry, a tell-tale sign of the smoky indirection and double-talk that makes truth virtually impossible to discern even to themselves. For better or for worse, Trump could not be accurately accused of employing such subtleties.

Trump’s type of lie is the type a guy tells a girl on a date or spouts at the Thanksgiving table. He exaggerates, he remembers things in a way that embellishes his image, he tells tall tales. These types of lies are mostly harmless. While distasteful, they don’t cover up agendas that could adversely affect millions of lives. Trump operates in a context of basic truth which has been his primary appeal.

Yet the liberal establishment thinks they can pull a fast one on the rest of us, that they can engage in a game of three card monte, by putting every Trump utterance under a microscope to find an inaccuracy. They think they can distract us by repeating some inane Trump aphorism while the president enacts sweeping policies that have made America safer and that have made the stock market soar. They think that they can draw our eyes off the ball which is that President Trump, his policies and his simple if not at times crude honesty threatens the rotten left-wing edifice that has retarded our country for the last half century. So far, the American people have not been so easily fooled.