No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar – Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln had a reputation for telling the truth – he became known through history, after all, as Honest Abe and he was honest enough to famously confess that honesty isn’t necessarily easy. But it was easier for him than lying.
“I am not bound to win,” he said, “but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to the light I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right – stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong.”
Which brings us to the recently re-nominated Donald Trump, miraculously spared from an assassin’s bullet, and now embarked on an election campaign constructed on a mountain of lies. Trump’s relationship with truth is much more than a fascinating, bizarre personal quirk. It is an insidious illness that has now infected – by some estimates – close to half the American electorate.
So while America’s news media obsessed over the distressingly feeble, sometimes incoherent performance of President Joe Biden in the July 27 presidential debate, they were strangely silent about the extraordinary number of transparent lies Trump told – some that were blatantly preposterous – including the denial that he had ever had sex with a porn star. It’s not an important lie in the hierarchy of Trump’s top 100 (the Washington Post’s Fact Checker team counted 30,573 lies in his four years as President), but it suggests that Trump is constitutionally incapable of confessing any mistake at any level at any time, even if it involves 34 actual felony count convictions.
Far more serious is his persistent insistence that the 2020 election was stolen, on top of the claim he actually won the popular vote against Hilary Clinton by “millions and millions” of votes in 2016.
As most of us know, some 60 legal challenges, in state and federal courts, failed to establish any evidence to support Trump’s claims. They are patently, totally, absurdly false. But Trump is wedded to that lie, married to it perhaps more intimately, completely and passionately than he is to his wife Melania. And the result is a toxic poison in the body politic that shakes the faith of millions of Americans in the integrity of the electoral system.
Like the covid threat that Trump foolishly downplayed and repeatedly misrepresented, the election lie infects those incapable or unwilling to accept the self-evident truth.
The 2020 election was the most studied, examined, researched, recounted and litigated in American history and there was absolutely nothing about it that was even remotely stolen. That is simple truth. It is undeniable. To say it was stolen is a LIE.
So, where does that leave us?
It leaves us, on the one hand, with an elderly, sometimes feeble, but intellectually vigorous, ethically respectable, policy-wise and emotionally empathic president being challenged by a man with no moral compass who can only campaign on the basis of an absurd lie that his otherwise sane and able political supporters must swallow in order to accept him.
Here’s the important thing to remember: No matter how much age takes its toll on Joe Biden, he is and will be surrounded by ranks of professional, experienced legislators, administrators, analysts, cabinet heads, scholars, advisors and elected office holders who have not had to lie to support him. People not burdened by the crushing burden of an enormous lie.
Truth seekers can dismantle the campaign statements of Joe Biden and find statements here and there with exaggeration, omission and misleading spin. That’s politics.
But no one can begin to find in the words and deeds of Joe Biden the astronomical record of lies that emanate from Donald Trump. And in those lies is a message of darkness, fear and despair that do not define the American spirit, that do not describe the quality of life in America today.
News media, to have credibility, must demand and pursue truth. In this election year American media have failed to provide an accurate picture of the difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
If Donald Trump is elected, his will be a presidency built on not one lie, but a mountain of lies, tens of thousands of lies, the most dangerous of which is the lie that Americans cannot trust their own elections.
This newspaper is a tiny voice in an enormous media universe. But we are compelled to demand that the lie be called a lie and that the liar be called a liar.
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