Lying and denial go hand in hand. Every time a lie is told, a denial must be concocted to protect the lie by denying that it is a lie. What Donald Trump realized decades ago when he was pursuing fame in the New York tabloids is that his denials did not need facts or evidence to back them up. Protecting his lies needed repetition, first of the lie, then of the denial, then of attacks on his accusers.
It’s been written that Trump learned this from his mentor, Roy Cohn, who was a criminal attorney in both senses of the words. But Trump didn’t need to learn how to lie and protect his lies from Roy Cohn. His own father taught him a master class in lying with his racist practice of either refusing to rent apartments to Black people or “steering” them into substandard dwellings and charging them more rent than he charged White people.
Donald Trump began working for his father’s real estate company in 1968, according to a 2016 article in the New York Times. He visited construction sites driven in his father’s Cadillac by a Black chauffeur and accompanied his father on visits to building managers of Trump rental properties. In 1973, the Department of Justice sued the Trump company, then known as Trump Management Inc., under the Fair Housing Act for discriminating on the basis of race against Black people. Donald Trump was named in the suit, along with his father, Fred Trump. Instead of settling with the government as other real estate companies had done when confronted with their racist practices, the Trumps hired Roy Cohn and went on the offensive, denying the DOJ’s charges and even filing their own $100 million defamation countersuit against the government. Cohn and the Trumps also took to the media, accusing the government of trying to force them to rent to “welfare recipients” and engaging in character assassination against government lawyers, even filing a contempt of court charge against one government attorney and accusing her of “turning the investigation into a ‘Gestapo-like interrogation,’” according to the Times report.
The case dragged on for two years. Finally, the judge dismissed both the contempt charge and the defamation countersuit, and the Trumps signed a consent decree, which Donald Trump said amounted to a “victory” because the Trump company had not admitted guilt. (Consent decrees do not typically include admissions of guilt.)
Real time fact-checking has gotten under Trump's skin this time around.
Trump’s company wasn’t finished with its racist discriminatory practices, however. In subsequent years, a DOJ investigation found that the Trumps were segregating Black tenants in what the Times called “a small number of complexes” where tenants complained of “falling plaster to rusty light fixtures to bloodstained floors.” The DOJ threatened to file another lawsuit, but the Trump company “effectively wore the government down” with delaying tactics and denials, according to the Times. The consent decree expired before the DOJ could file a new case.
I will stop right here and pose the question: Does any of this sound familiar?
Of course it does.
Trump’s dealings with the Department of Justice in the 1970s and 1980s were the beginnings of what we might call Trump’s lie-industrial complex. You tell lie after lie, issue denial after denial, launch attack after attack, all the while claiming that you are the one who is being discriminated against.
Trump spreads one vicious lie after another about immigrants, alleging that tens of thousands of “illegal” immigrants descended on the town of Springfield, Ohio, population 58,000, taking people’s jobs, eating their cats and committing crimes such as murder and rape. He tells lies about other towns such as Aurora, Colorado, where immigrant “gangs” are taking over entire apartment complexes “with AK-47s and they’re going to take over the whole damn state by the time they finish, unless I become president.” He has even ginned up a whole new lie, that immigrants are crossing the border with Mexico “from the Congo in Africa. Many people from the Congo. I don’t know what that is, but they come out of jails in the Congo.”
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He tells this lie at every one of his rallies, accusing President Biden and Vice President Harris of “letting in criminals from “insane asylums which are mental institutions on steroids” using what he calls “Kamala’s migrant phone app. She’s got a phone app. It’s meant for the cartel heads. The cartel heads call the app and they tell them where to drop the illegal migrants…It’s not even believable.”
He lies about his stand on abortion – he was for it before he was against it, and pay attention now, he’s for abortion in states that want it so long as people vote for it…or something anyway. He lies about the economy, that “his” economy was the greatest in history and today’s inflation is “the highest it’s ever been.”
Donald Trump isn’t content to just spew lies and more lies, overwhelming any attempts to keep up with him. Now Trump demands an end to fact-checking by journalists from every kind of news organization. After first scheduling the interview with the CBS program “60 Minutes” that presidential candidates have traditionally done every election year in October, Trump canceled the interview because the network refused to commit to not fact-checking what he said. Trump, his running mate JD Vance and any Republican who could find a microphone complained that the presidential debate between Trump and Kamala Harris was “three against one” because the debate moderators had corrected the former president when he claimed that Haitian immigrants were eating the pets of neighbors in Springfield, Ohio. Debate moderator David Muir said that ABC News had been told by Springfield’s city manager that “there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”
The Washington Post reported that Trump’s campaign manager Chris LaCivita “erupted” at ABC executives in the middle of the debate because Trump was fact-checked and demanded that fact-checking be stopped for the rest of the debate. Trump has lately begun threatening to cancel the broadcasting licenses of networks that have not covered his campaign “fairly.” He has regularly in the past called entire television networks such as CNN “fake news” and “enemies of the people,” using a phrase commonly uttered by dictators like Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler.
During the vice-presidential debate, Vance claimed that Democrats are in favor of a form of abortion that kills babies after they have left the womb and that the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are “illegal.” As CBS News debate moderator Margaret Brennan correctly said, Haitian immigrants in Springfield are in this country under a legal “temporary protected status,” and there is no state in the nation where it is legal to kill post-birth babies.
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Vance’s response to moderator Brennan’s real-time fact-check sums up Trump’s new paradigm that he and his running mate have a right to lie without being corrected. “Margaret, the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check,” Vance shouted.
Ever since he first announced that he was running for president in 2015, Trump’s calculation has been that if he tells lies and repeats them over and over that neither Democrats nor the major news organizations will be able to keep up with him. The Washington Post attempted to catalog Trump’s lies during his administration, counting more than 30,000 in all, amounting to more than 20 lies a day. But that was an attempt to record the number of lies after the fact. Real time fact-checking has gotten under his skin this time around, however. It is regularly reported that Trump changes the lies that he tells, adding to the number he uses for undocumented immigrants: it’s 15 million, then 20 million, then 25 million. This reflects Trump’s conclusion that it doesn’t matter how you lie; you only continue to lie.
But it does matter. The number of insurrectionists convicted of committing felonies at the Capitol on Jan. 6 continues to grow. Trump still faces felony indictments for attempting to overthrow the results of the 2020 election. Trump claims his innocence, but his 34 felony convictions still stand. His adjudication as a rapist in the defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll and the judgment of millions against him is still in effect.
The problem with Trump’s lies isn’t their number or even what he lies about; fact-checking helps, as does evidence of their falsehood. Ultimately the solution is at the ballot box, where counting votes matters and lies don’t.
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