Tag: President Liar

  • It’s not just Sharpie-gate

    NOAA’s weird, unattributed statement is not being well received.

    The Post’s Greg Sargent:

    It’s not just Sharpie-gate. This is part of a broader pattern. I count at least seven glaring examples in which government officials have wheeled into action in an effort to make Trump’s lies, errors and obsessions into truths.

    He wrote it up at the Post:

    Again and again, government officials have wheeled into action in an effort to make Trump’s lies, errors and obsessions into truths, in some cases issuing “official” information explicitly shaped or doctored to do so.

    He counts at least seven times this has happened. It started on day one, with the Crowd Size issue. He made Sean Spicer tell brazen lies, and he told his Park Service chief to find pictures that would back him up.

    There were the many lies about voter fraud.

    When Trump declared before the midterm elections that “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in” with migrant caravans, multiple officials tried to bolster this claim by offering an official-seeming statistic about terrorism arrests that was entirely spurious and proved nothing of the kind.

    When Trump vowed a surprise 10 percent middle class tax cut before the midterms, officials were caught off guard, but nonetheless sprang into action to try to create the impression this was a real promise by, for instance, discussing a nonbinding pledge. The tax cut never happened.

    To justify suspending the credentials of CNN’s Jim Acosta after he annoyed Trump, then-White House press secretary Sarah Sanders shared a video that experts determined had been deceptively edited to make Acosta look physically abusive toward a press aide.

    That’s like the faked weather chart – actually forging “evidence” to make his lies look true.

    He told lies about violence against migrant women to whip up support for The Wall and an official tried to find evidence that would make them true.

    To buttress Trump’s distortions of the migrant threat, the Department of Homeland Security produced a slick official presentation about the border that claimed nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists had been blocked from entering the United States. But this number had nothing whatsoever to do with efforts to cross the border, a distinction multiple officials also dishonestly fudged.

    Some time ago, Dana Milbank noted that in multiple cases such as these, government officials are using “federal resources in vain attempts to turn the president’s lies into truth.”

    Government officials are not supposed to use federal resources for that purpose.

    One interesting question is why Trump doesn’t just concede he made a mistake — or, to get even more outlandish about this, try to learn from it.

    After all, It’s not like this is one of the big, foundational lies Trump regularly tells to support the entire narrative of his presidency, such as the claims that he was totally exonerated by the special counsel probe, or that China is paying his tariffs, or that he inherited a horrible economy and converted it into the greatest economy in the history of this country.

    By contrast, this was in all probability a mistake. Yet Trump has now kept this story going again, raging on Twitter that “certain models” did say Alabama might be hit.

    Why? Because that’s how much of a jerk he is. A normal person realizes everyone makes mistakes and that it’s far better to admit them than to stick yourself with having to defend them forever. Trump is not a normal person: his ego is so precious to him that nothing is too contemptible or criminal when he wants to shield it. His vanity is more important to him than all the people alive today – he would see us all shoveled into a cosmic furnace rather than admit to a lie. Nothing on earth matters to him more than his own loathsome self.

    Can you imagine a life lived that way? Everything there is in the world – oceans, birds, music, flowers, poetry, generosity, sunsets – as dust and ashes compared to him?

    He’s the ultimate “sucks to be that guy.”

  • An invisible 10-foot wall

    Headlines can be funny. Headline in the Post:

    Trump claims there’s a 10-foot wall around the Obamas’ D.C. home. Neighbors say there’s not.

    Immediately below the headline there’s a photo of the house which clearly shows there’s no 10-foot wall around it. The “Neighbors say” is otiose when we can see for ourselves that there’s not.

    Anyway.

    In one of his most recent arguments for a southern border wall, President Trump on Sunday falsely claimed that the Washington home of former president Barack Obama and Michelle Obama is surrounded by a 10-foot wall.

    Damn, talk about other minds. Dude, the house exists and people can see it! We can all see your big dumb stupid lie!

    He might as well say the Capitol is painted orange or the Washington monument has sprouted wings.

    Some found the president’s tweet irresponsible. Fred Guttenberg, the father of one of students killed in the Parkland school shooting, tweeted, “Are you seriously trying to put our former President at risk?”

    The Secret Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s tweet and security risks Monday morning.

    A spokesman for the Obamas declined to comment on Trump’s tweet, and the White House did not respond to an email requesting more context on Trump’s claim that there is a wall around the property.

    “More context” – what other context could there be? “Trump makes shit up” is merely what we already know.

  • The list grows longer

    Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star is tracking Trump’s serial lies about Matt Whitaker.

  • Fake news

    This is making me laugh. Trump has fake covers of Time magazine with none other than Donald Trump himself hanging in some of his golf clubs. Fake ones. Fake.

    The framed copy of Time Magazine was hung up in at least five of President Trump’s clubs, from South Florida to Scotland. Filling the entire cover was a photo of Donald Trump.

    “Donald Trump: The ‘Apprentice’ is a television smash!” the big headline said. Above the Time nameplate, there was another headline in all caps: “TRUMP IS HITTING ON ALL FRONTS . . . EVEN TV!”

    This cover — dated March 1, 2009 — looks like an impressive memento from Trump’s pre-presidential career. To club members eating lunch, or golfers waiting for a pro-shop purchase, it seemed to be a signal that Trump had always been a man who mattered. Even when he was just a reality-TV star, Trump was the kind of star who got a cover story in Time.

    Except he wasn’t.

    Look at that handsome important successful steely-eyed man of steel. Not a trace of fish-mouth, the absurd hair-sculpture obscured by the word TIME, the arms folded in Power Mode – at a quick glance he looks every bit as important and businessy as your average manager of an insurance office in Tulsa. Every bit. He’s an ornament to the cover of Time. Only it’s fake.

    Fake.

    The Time cover is a fake.

    There was no March 1, 2009, issue of Time Magazine. And there was no issue at all in 2009 that had Trump on the cover.

    In fact, the cover on display at Trump’s clubs, observed recently by a reporter visiting one of the properties, contains several small but telling mistakes. Its red border is skinnier than that of a genuine Time cover, and, unlike the real thing, there is no thin white border next to the red. The Trump cover’s secondary headlines are stacked on the right side — on a real Time cover, they would go across the top.

    And it has two exclamation points. Time headlines don’t yell.

    Hahahaha and where are they? On the flattering headlines about Trump. This is the guy who used to call reporters using a fake name to tell them what that guy Donald Trump had been up to lately.

    “I can confirm that this is not a real TIME cover,” Kerri Chyka, a spokeswoman for Time Inc., wrote in an email to The Washington Post.

    At 5 p.m. Tuesday, a spokeswoman for Time said that the magazine had asked the Trump Organization to remove the phony cover from the walls where it was on display.

    So how did Trump — who spent an entire campaign and much of his presidency accusing the mainstream media of producing “fake news” — wind up decorating his properties with a literal piece of phony journalism?

    Oh that’s easy. He’s an unselfconscious liar who simply doesn’t care that he has one law for himself and another for everyone else. Another word for that is “psychopath.”

    Trump’s corporation didn’t answer questions on the subject. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said can’t comment.

    He is such a dork.

  • 9th Circuit to President Liar: Nope

    Oh dear, poor Lying Don, another harsh blow. 9th Circuit says a big no to Don’s Excellent Travel Ban.

    Another federal court has ruled against President Donald Trump’s revised executive order limiting travel from six predominately Muslim countries — and like other courts, used his tweets against him.

    The ruling from a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is yet another stinging loss from a court that similarly refused to reinstate Trump’s original executive order on travel in February.

    “We conclude that the President, in issuing the Executive Order, exceeded the scope of the authority delegated to him by Congress,” the three judges, all appointed by President Bill Clinton, wrote. “(I)mmigration, even for the President, is not a one-person show.”

    The judges cited Trump’s latest tweets in the travel ban saga.

    “That’s right, we need a TRAVEL BAN for certain DANGEROUS countries, not some politically correct term that won’t help us protect our people!” Trump tweeted on June 5.

    Everybody warned him about that tweet. He doesn’t listen very well, does he.

    They also cited White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s confirmation that the President’s tweets are “considered official statements by the President of the United States.”

    Sad.

  • When backed into a corner, lie like a rug

    Amber Phillips notes there’s this pattern President Liar has of throwing out criminal accusations whenever the heat gets too close to his bum.

    We know that James B. Comey is a leaker. It’s doubtful that he’s a criminal; legal experts have said that even though the former FBI director shared his memos of conversations with President Trump with the media, if the information wasn’t classified, that probably wasn’t a crime.

    Do we know that Comey is a leaker? I don’t feel as if I know that. He shared his own notes with a friend with a request to read portions to the Times. The notes were typed on a fed machine on fed time, true, but is that by itself really enough to qualify them as a leak if he shares them? Especially when the conversation they record was forced on him in the first place? When he would have avoided the conversation if he could have?

    At any rate, Trump’s response was that tweet we saw yesterday:

    Trump just basically accused the FBI director he fired of leaking classified information, days after Comey testified under oath to Congress that the president might have interfered in an FBI investigation.

    In hindsight, this tweet probably shouldn’t have been surprising: When the president feels threatened, his go-to move is to accuse his opponent of doing something illegal and offer no evidence to back it up. Conspiracy theorists can and will pick this up and run with it, people can choose to believe which narrative they want, and the waters are sufficiently muddied.

    And Trump, I would think, has opened himself to a libel suit.

    But soon, Trump could regret this tweet. Congress might be calling the president’s bluff — if that’s what it is — by asking the White House to turn over tapes of Trump’s conversations with Comey (if they exist) and other evidence of their conversations. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) even invited Trump to testify before Congress. (“One hundred percent,” Trump said Friday when asked in a news conference if he’d testify under oath if asked.)

    The problem for Trump is that Comey is a largely credible witness, and his testimony under oath was detailed and shocking.

    Unlike Comey, Trump has offered no proof. And he appears to be going out of his way to create another story line: Comey is a leaker (true), and maybe even leaked more than we know about and it might be illegal (there is no evidence for this).

    I don’t think Comey has offered any “proof” either, unless the legal definition is more relaxed than I realized. He’s offered evidence. We all learned at the start of his that an agent’s contemporaneous notes are considered admissible evidence in court, but evidence isn’t the same as proof. I think the actual claim should be that Comey has offered evidence while Trump has not. The nature of the evidence though is surely different when the agent in question is defending himself as well as his agency, the country, etc. I don’t for a second think Comey lied, but if I were Trump’s lawyer I’m sure I would point out that it’s certainly possible that he did, and that he had a motive.

    Trump does this so often that reporters call him out in news stories for it. “It has long been his practice to stir up new controversies to deflect attention from a damaging news cycle,” The Washington Post’s White House team wrote about the wiretapping tweet.

    In November, just weeks after Trump’s election, he claimed that the biggest voter fraud in U.S. history caused him to lose the popular vote. Seven months later, there’s no investigation of this, and there is no evidence for it.

    He’s a serial liar, who tells destructive lies about other people to protect or puff up himself. And he’s the president.

  • Act One scene 7

    So what might happen next? Don could fall a few more flights.

    but how much worse could this get? The chatter on the Sunday shows hinted at where we may be headed. Here are a few things to watch for:

    The tapes Trump hinted at turn out not to exist. On ABC’s “This Week,” Jay Sekulow, a member of Trump’s legal team, said Trump will make a decision very soon on whether to release the tapes he may have made of his conversations with then-FBI Director James B. Comey.  After the news broke that Trump may have demanded a “loyalty” pledge from Comey, the president tweeted that Comey had better hope he doesn’t have tapes of their conversations. Trump has since hinted he still might release them, and congressional investigators have demanded them.

    This state of play is utter lunacy in its current form — the White House has still not said whether these tapes exist, even as Trump hints they might still be coming, and we are so numb to Trump’s daily crazy at this point that we now oddly treat this as somewhat unremarkable. Maybe they do exist. But what happens if the White House, in response to those congressional demands, ultimately confirms that they don’t? Experts think the White House will have to come clean in some way. At that point, it would be confirmed that Trump invented the existence of these tapes to chill Comey from offering a full public accounting of the events leading up to his firing — which itself was a massive abuse of power, given that Trump allowed it was because of the FBI’s Russia probe — in the full knowledge that Comey was going to serve as a witness before long. What will Republicans say about that?

    Most of them? The usual – he’s new to the job, he’s still learning about the rules and norms, he ran as a mavericky rebel dude, he’s a CEO not a politician, but her emails, draining the swamp, but Comey and her emails, yadda yadda yadda.

    But what if he confirms they do exist, and produces them, and it can be determined they were not altered in any way? Well then, clearly, he’d be in deep shit, so it’s not going to happen.

    What, there’s no chance that Comey’s lying and Trump’s telling the truth? Correct: there’s no chance of that.

  • It shows this president doesn’t know how to conduct himself

    Clapper on the other hand has flatly denied it. He says he would have known if it had happened and it didn’t happen. President Liar is lying.

    Speaking on NBC News on Sunday morning, former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., who served in that post in the Obama administration, denied that a wiretap was authorized against Trump or his campaign during his tenure.

    “There was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president-elect at the time as a candidate or against his campaign,” Clapper said on “Meet the Press.”

    He added that he would “absolutely” have been informed if the FBI had sought or received a warrant to wiretap Trump or his campaign.

    “I can deny it,” Clapper continued.

    President Liar doesn’t get to just make shit up and then demand investigations of the shit he just made up. He’s not a dictator. He thinks he is, but he isn’t; not yet.

    The unusual and blunt on-the-record statement came shortly after the White House issued a statement doubling down on the explosive accusations Trump leveled against Obama on Twitter on Saturday.

    The explosive accusations based on nothing.

    Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said he is not aware of evidence to back up the president’s claim.

    “I have no insight into exactly what he’s referring to,” Rubio said on “Meet the Press.” “The president put that out there, and now the White House will have to answer for exactly what he was referring to.”

    Obama’s allies were more blunt, denying flatly that the former president had ordered a wiretap of Trump’s campaign.

    “This may come as a surprise to the current occupant of the Oval Office, but the president of the United States does not have the authority to unilaterally order the wiretapping of American citizens,” said former Obama White House press secretary Josh Earnest.

    Wouldn’t it be a relief if the current occupant of the Oval Office had even that much knowledge of what said occupant can and cannot do? Wouldn’t you think he would have studied it up a little before moving in?

    Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told “Meet the Press” that Trump is “in trouble” and acting “beneath the dignity of the presidency.”

    “The president’s in trouble if he falsely spread this kind of information,” Schumer said. “It shows this president doesn’t know how to conduct himself.”

    It shows it for the 80 thousandth time.

  • Welcome to our new, terrifying reality

    Phil Plait on Trump’s censorship of the science agencies:

    Welcome to our new, terrifying reality: According to reports, President Donald Trump’s administration has ordered a media blackout of people who work at the Environmental Protection Agency and the United States Department of Agriculture.

    He adds that he wants to be careful, and that this could be just a transitional move while the new administration gets sorted.

    This may be true. BuzzFeed and the Associated Press, however, obtained internal emails from the EPA and USDA that indicate the new administration is gagging people at the two government agencies, forbidding them [to tweet], going on any social media, or issuing press releases about their science. The only news they are allowed to issue must be vetted first. Also, in the case of the EPA, a Trump administration order has frozen grants and any new business. Note that the EPA has been under heavy attack by the GOP for years.

    …

    It appears that Trump wants to keep these groups under the thumb of the White House, and to make sure the only news that gets out aligns with what the new administration approves.

    If true, this is no media blackout. It’s censorship.

    Again, this seems like an extreme conclusion, but we now live in a time of extreme circumstances. Just days ago we saw Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s first press meeting, where he blatantly lied about the size of Trump’s inauguration audience, then abruptly left without taking questions. Then Trump spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway dismissed criticism of Spicer, saying he was presenting “alternative facts.”

    In short, brazen lying is their MO.

    The trend here is clear. Trump has been lying and saying provably false things since the early days of his campaign; his entire rise to the top of the GOP presidential candidate heap was based on his birtherism. He has also fervently denied any science that goes against his ideology, picking and choosing what he wishes to believe (or disbelieve). Hence his denial of the reality of human-induced climate change and his courting of the worst of the anti-vaccination promoters like RFK Jr. and Andrew Wakefield—the latter is the father of the modern anti-vax movement, even though he has been struck off the U.K. General Medical Council’s register and his original findings have been retracted and branded as fraudulent.

    Ordering the EPA to take down its climate change pages is appalling. As Reuters says,

    The page includes links to the EPA’s inventory of greenhouse gas emissions, which contains emissions data from individual industrial facilities as well as the multiagency Climate Change Indicators report, which describes trends related to the causes and effects of climate change.

    The Trump administration’s recently appointed team to guide the post-Obama transition has drawn heavily from the energy industry lobby and pro-drilling think tanks, according to a list of the newly introduced 10-member team.

    So yeah, that’s very, very worrisome.

    So no, we don’t have to just shrug and say “Well he has absolute power so whatever.”

    We’ve seen this happen before in recent times; when Stephen Harper became Canada’s prime minister, his anti-science right-wing administration did much the same thing, gagging scientists, including climate scientists, from talking to the media or public. Scientists rebelled and created their own site where they could announce their results, but the gag order wasn’t rescinded until Harper’s party was voted out of power. Besides it being a national embarrassment, the gag order meant that news articles about scientific research could report it incorrectly and the scientists could not issue corrections. It also allowed Harper to prevent the public knowing about research that went against his own anti-climate agenda.

    Don’t think it can happen here? It already has, back in the George W. Bush administration, when for just one example a PR flack was put in place at NASAwho meddled with their science communication efforts.

    And now, it seems, it’s happening here once again.

    This is extremely worrying. In the absence of scientific autonomy and open discussion, the administration is free to make up whatever reality serves it best. Given that Trump signed an executive order making it easier to build the Dakota Access Pipeline—a colossal conflict of interest, since Trump has stock in the company that would build it—we can see very clearly what reality that will be. Massive corruption, suppression of free speech and the freedom of the press, oppression of minorities, the complete reversal of women’s rights, and the literal sickening of America.

    In short we’re in deep trouble and must fight back every way we know how.

  • Invented facts

    Yesterday Trump met with Congressional boffins, and he actually told them that illegal voters cost him the popular vote. That’s a fake news alternative facts lie.

    Days after being sworn in, President Trump insisted to congressional leaders invited to a reception at the White House that he would have won the popular vote had it not been for millions of illegal votes, according to people familiar with the meeting.

    Trump has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that widespread voter fraud caused him to lose the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, even while he clinched the presidency with an electoral college victory.

    Two people familiar with the meeting said Trump spent about 10 minutes at the start of the bipartisan gathering rehashing the campaign. He also told them that between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes caused him to lose the popular vote.

    This is at a time when Republicans are working hard to suppress non-white voting.

    #TrumpIsScum

  • Lies 1-3

    Greg Sargent at the Washington Post takes an in-depth look at Trump’s persistent lying. He cites the tweets in which Trump says he never mocked the reporter he did mock.

    Here Trump is telling two lies about a third lie. A quick review: Trump’s mockery of a disabled reporter came after he claimed “thousands and thousands” of Muslims living in America celebrated 9/11. Kovaleski had written an article just after 9/11 that claimed law enforcement “detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks.” Under fire for his falsehood about celebratory Muslims, Trump cited that article to push back, even though an “alleged” “number” is hardly proof of “thousands.” In response to that, the reporter put out a statement saying he did not witness Trump’s version of events. But Trump cited that statement as proof that the reporter had dishonestly backtracked on a story that backed Trump’s position (a lie Trump repeated in Monday’s tweets). That’s how Trump’s mockery of the reporter arose: He waved his arms and mock-quoted the reporter saying “I don’t know what I said!” (See Glenn Kessler’s extensive anatomy of the full story.)

    A “number of people”≠“thousands and thousands” of people. Not at all. A “number of people”≠a crowd or a mob or a mass of people. That’s not the right phrase to use when you mean to indicate a large though indeterminate number. It’s much closer to “several” then it is to “thousands and thousands.”

    To recap: Lie No. 1 is that thousands of U.S.-based Muslims celebrated 9/11. Lie No. 2 is that the disabled reporter’s original story backed Trump and that the reporter backtracked on it. Lie No. 3 is that Trump didn’t mock that disabled reporter (in fact, he flapped his hands around frantically after saying, “you gotta see this guy!”).

    The claim about celebrating Muslims was one of Trump’s biggest lies — one that was central to his key campaign narrative about the Muslim Enemy Within. And so, Streep wasn’t merely calling out Trump’s bullying and abusiveness. She was also calling out his uniquely uncontrollable lying, and the extent to which Trump will go to attack reporters in service of it.

    That should be the lengths to which Trump will go. You can’t go to an extent the way you can go to lengths. It should be “the extent to which Trump will lie” or “the lengths to which Trump will go.” But the point is clear enough: Trump lies constantly and shamelessly, and he does it to damage and harm people he dislikes. He’s a very bad man.

    It’s often argued that we should perhaps give less attention to Trump’s tweets. But Monday’s barrage gets at something important. Yes, all politicians lie. But with only days to go until Trump assumes vast power, Monday’s tweetstorm is a reminder that we may be witnessing something new and different in the nature and degree of the dishonesty at issue. Here again we’re seeing Trump’s willingness to keep piling the lies on top of one another long after the original foundational lies have been widely debunked, and to keep on attacking the press for not playing along with his version of reality, as if the very possibility of shared reality can be stamped out by Trumpian edict, or Trumpian Tweedict.

    Seriously. As is no doubt obvious, I don’t at all buy the claim that we should pay less attention to Trump’s tweets; I think they’re a direct line to what a poisonous shit he is. Sure they could function as distractions but we can avoid that by avoiding it, and they are important in themselves. It’s important to know what malevolent, childish, ignorant, stupid thoughts he’s willing to put out there for all of us to see.

    Some journalists are arguing that we need to take care in labeling Trump’s falsehoods as “lies,” because that imputes motive and intent. If some feel more comfortable labeling them “false,” that will probably suffice most of the time, with the crucial caveat that it must be done squarely and prominently. But the broader point here is that, in the debate over how to handle Trump’s profound and unprecedented dishonesty, let’s not underplay the possibility that the usual conventions of political journalism may prove woefully insufficient to conveying to readers and viewers what Trump is really up to here.

    Yep.

  • How Trump decides what’s true

    One for the Strange Bedfellows file: Trump and Assange.

    President-elect Donald Trump has backed Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in casting doubt on intelligence alleging Russian meddling in the US election.

    Mr Assange said Russia was not the source for the site’s mass leak of emails from the Democratic Party.

    Mr Trump has now backed that view in a tweet. He wrote: “Assange… said Russians did not give him the info!”

    The president-elect has repeatedly refused to accept the conclusions of the US intelligence community.

    Based on what? Nothing. Just his wishes. He doesn’t want it to be the case that Russia hacked DNC emails and helped sabotage Clinton, therefore he asserts that it’s not the case. He is Important, and the truth is not, therefore he gets to assert whatever he chooses to assert as truth, because he is The Big Dog, and the big dog is always right.

    On Tuesday evening, Mr Trump said an intelligence briefing he was due to receive on the issue had been delayed.

    “Perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!” he wrote.

    But US intelligence officials insisted there had been no delay in the briefing schedule.

    Liar liar liar liar liar liar. Trump is such a liar.

  • When he lies, say he lied

    The big meal on the news media plate is how to deal with a president who tells shameless brazen lies all the time. They’re used to dealing with presidents (and members of Congress and similar) who conceal and obfuscate and dance around the truth, but not ones who just tell obvious lies many times every day, including on Twitter. They’re struggling.

    Donald Trump is once again claiming credit for beating back the scourge of outsourcing, this time insisting that he is the reason that Sprint has announced plans to move thousands of jobs back to America from other countries.

    “Because of what’s happening, and the spirit and the hope, I was just called by the head people at Sprint, and they are going to be bringing 5,000 jobs back to the United States,” Trump said, adding that the news of jobs “coming back into the United States” marks “a nice change.” Trump later added that the jobs were coming back “because of me.”

    And yet – it’s at least not that simple, but most newspapers did a crap job of making that clear in their headlines.

    Some headlines did manage to convey this basic underlying problem. Politico noted in its headline that Trump was touting “previously announced” jobs. Bloomberg was even better, stating flatly in its headline: “Trump seeks credit for 5,000 Sprint jobs already touted.”

    I would like to propose a rule of thumb for these situations: If the headline does not convey the fact that Trump’s claimis in question or open to doubt, based on the known facts, then it is insufficiently informative. The Bloomberg headline does accomplish this. If the headline merely conveys that Trump claimed credit for something, without also conveying that this is open to doubt, then it risks being misleading, particularly since people often scan headlines without digging deeper into the stories and the factual details.

    “Claimed credit” is a red flag for me, but then that’s because by now I know quite a bit about Trump’s habit of lying. I’ve primed myself to see “claimed credit” as a red flag. If I hadn’t I might miss it.

    Why is this a risk any news org would choose to take, when it doesn’t have to? Look, it’s obvious that Trump has adopted a strategy of actively trying to game such headlines in his favor. Trump’s claims about Carrier jobs staying in Indiana turned out to be significantly less rosy upon closer inspection. And remember when Trump falsely claimed credit for keeping a Ford plant here that was going to stay anyway? It really doesn’t take much to convey it in a headline when Trump’s claim is in doubt.

    And it’s not as if it’s not newsworthy, either.

    Pretty much everyone already accepts that Trump’s nonstop lies and embellishment pose an unprecedented challenge to the news media. What’s more, we’ve already seen news orgs actively adjust their editorial approaches to cope with it. When the New York Times famously broke with precedent and called Trump’s birtherism a “lie” in a front page headline, executive editor Dean Baquet explained that this was necessary because Trump was going beyond the “normal sort of obfuscation that politicians traffic in.” In other words, Trump is forging new frontiers of dishonesty, and news organizations must adjust accordingly.

    He lies. Constantly. He won the election by lying constantly. The news media have to report on him accordingly.

  • Guest post: No respectable charity would ever make that ludicrous claim

    Originally a comment by Josh Spokes on More lies.

    I realize this is probably obvious to many, but I want to point out another way in which he’s not only lying but doesn’t even know how to lie convincingly about this.

    I’m the executive at a nonprofit charity. The kind with the IRS tax designation 501(c)(3). This is this the kind of charity where a donor can deduct the contribution from her taxes. Think the Red Cross, your local food pantry, animal shelter, educational nonprofit. Also the same designation as charities like those run by Trump or Hillary Clinton. It’s all the same beast for tax purposes:

    1. No charity in the world sends 100 percent of its money to other charities, nor does it spend 100 percent of its money “on the mission.” That is not objectively possible.

    2. Why? Because humans have to be paid to carry out the mission. This is why charities have staff. Only the tiniest charitable groups of maybe a few hundred or thousand active donors run entirely on volunteer support.

    3. Even those few charities that are all volunteer have costs. The minute a volunteer puts a first class stamp on an envelope to send a donor a thank you letter, that’s a percentage of the charity’s money that it spent on something other than the core mission. It’s an administrative expense.

    Again, it’s not possible for any charity under any circumstances to have no overhead costs.

    4. No respectable charity would ever make that ludicrous claim. First because it’s not true, and second because it’s not believable. We in the nonprofit sector work hard to spend as much as we can directly on the mission and as little as possible on “administration.” But that itself is a game anyway, since the mission happens through the administrative expense of paying professionals to carry it out.

  • More lies

    Trump’s been telling porkies again, or still – these about his charitable donations. It’s the familiar pattern: he brags about how great he is, reporters ask questions, it turns out he was telling lies.

    Even the most unsparing critic of the news media cannot deny the tremendous effort put forth by Washington Post reporter David A. Fahrenthold as he spent months doggedly trying to document all of Donald Trump’s donations to charity. The task wasn’t easy—the candidate refused to release his tax returns—so Fahrenthold probed records going back decades, repeatedly questioned the Trump campaign, and contacted more than 400 nonprofit organizations while showing his work.

    They show us a page from his notes – a list of nonprofits with a big NEVER beside nearly all of them. There are some no comments and some blanks. The big dollar amounts must be…on some other page.

    This transparently conducted reporting yielded much information. The public learned that the Donald J. Trump Foundation once spent $20,000 on a portrait of Donald Trump; that $258,000 from his charitable foundation was used to settle legal problems; that he misled the audience of The Celebrity Apprentice about his giving.

    He’s given away some money, but far less than he claims. He’s used some “donations” to his own advantage, like the one to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. He hides everything.

    Records show Trump has given nothing to his foundation since 2008. Trump and his staff are adamant that he has given away millions privately, off the foundation’s books. Trump won’t release his tax returns, which would confirm such gifts, and his staff won’t supply details.

    “There’s no way for you to know or understand,” Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks told BuzzFeed recently.

    And yet, Conor Friedersdorf points out, he goes on bragging anyway.

    I gave millions of dollars to DJT Foundation, raised or recieved millions more, ALL of which is given to charity, and media won’t report!

    The DJT Foundation, unlike most foundations, never paid fees, rent, salaries or any expenses. 100% of money goes to wonderful charities!

    He’s such a shameless liar.

  • The Times on Trump’s insistent lying

    The Times editorial board has a think piece on what to do about Trump’s relentless lying. They use that word a lot. As I mentioned a week or two ago, newspapers don’t do that lightly – they don’t do it at all unless they’re very sure they can back it up. This piece treats Trump’s lying as not even in doubt.

    Mind you, they start with an odd claim.

    Donald Trump understood at least one thing better than almost everybody watching the 2016 election: The breakdown of a shared public reality built upon widely accepted facts represented not a hazard, but an opportunity.

    The institutions that once generated and reaffirmed that shared reality — including the church, the government, the news media, the universities and labor unions — are in various stages of turmoil or even collapse.

    Including the church? First of all, what church? There is no singular “the church” here. But much more to the point, what do churches and other religious institutions have to do with a shared public reality built upon widely accepted facts? Nothing. Churches & co are about myths, or stories, or fictions, or lies. They’re also about rituals and community and the like, but they rest on a shared story.

    But that’s a side issue.

    The rise of social media has been great in many ways. In a media environment with endless inputs and outlets, citizens can inform and entertain one another, organize more easily and hold their leaders accountable. But it also turns out that when everyone can customize his or her own information bubble, it’s easier for demagogues to deploy made-up facts to suit the story they want to tell.

    That’s what Mr. Trump has done. For him, facts aren’t the point; trust is. Like any autocrat, he wins his followers’ trust — let’s call it a blind trust — by lying so often and so brazenly that millions of people give up on trying to distinguish truth from falsehood. Whether the lie is about millions of noncitizens voting illegally, or the crime rate, or President Obama’s citizenship, it doesn’t matter: In a confusing world of competing, shouted “truths,” the simplest solution is to trust in your leader. As Mr. Trump is fond of saying, “I alone can fix it.”

    If the solution is trust…then why trust a nasty bully like Trump? It’s not as if he’s good at putting on a convincing performance of trustworthiness. He performs anger and belligerence. That’s what seems to draw people, not trust.

    He is not just indifferent to facts; he can be hostile to any effort to assert them. On Tuesday, Chuck Jones, a union boss at Carrier Corporation, toldThe Washington Post that Mr. Trump was wrong when he claimed to have saved 1,100 of the company’s jobs from moving to Mexico — the real number will be closer to 730. Rather than admit error, the president-elect instead attacked Mr. Jones, a private citizen, on Twitter, saying he had done a “terrible job representing workers.”

    In other words, Mr. Trump’s is a different kind of lying, though it has been coming for some time.

    Sure; it’s a different kind of lying because he’s a different kind of guy. He’s exceptional in so many ways – ignorance, pugnacity, rudeness, cruelty, corruption, greed – it’s no surprise that he’s exceptionally dishonest and proud of it, too.

  • Sifting fact from speculation and rumor

    The New York Times yesterday pointed out Michael Flynn’s fondness for conspiracy theories and fake news.

    For Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who is President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice for national security adviser, pushing conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton is a family affair: Both he and his son, Michael G. Flynn, have used social media to spread fake news stories linking Mrs. Clinton to underage sex rings and other serious crimes, backed by no evidence.

    The Twitter habits of both men are attracting renewed attention after a man fired a rifle on Sunday inside Comet Ping Pong, a Washington pizza restaurant that was the subject of false stories during the campaign tying it and the Clinton campaign to a child sex trafficking ring.

    Lies and people who believe lies helped get Trump, a chronic liar, elected. Something is wrong here.

    Well before he joined the Trump campaign, the elder Mr. Flynn, 57, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, pushed unsubstantiated claims about Islamic law’s spreading in the United States and about the attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. But in his emergence this year as the angry former general out to help Mr. Trump clean up Washington, Mr. Flynn added wild stories about Hillary Clinton to his stock of unproven tales.

    Six days before the election, for instance, Mr. Flynn posted on Twitter a fake news story that claimed the police and prosecutors in New York had found evidence linking Mrs. Clinton and much of her senior campaign staff to pedophilia, money laundering, perjury and other felonies.

    That is really disgusting as well as frightening. That is the future national security adviser. How do we know he and Trump won’t start a war based on fake news?! We don’t.

    https://twitter.com/GenFlynn/status/794000841518776320

    Does that look like a good fit for the job?

    And then there’s his son. I was hoping he’s beside the point, but he’s not, because he works for his daddy.

    Michael G. Flynn, 33, is more than just a relative of an incoming senior administration official. In recent years, he has served as the chief of staff to his father, who started a private intelligence and consulting business, the Flynn Intel Group, after being forced to retire from the military in 2014.

    Throughout the campaign, Michael G. Flynn served as a gatekeeper for his father, and he now appears to have a job with the Trump transition team. Email sent to an address at the Flynn Intel Group returned with an automated response that provided a new email contact for both Flynns, and each had a Trump transition email address that ended with .gov.

    I’ve seen headlines today that say he’s no longer part of the transition team. His public blurts are even worse than the general’s.

    But the general is the one whose job it is to filter out lies.

    His role as national security adviser calls for mediating the conflicting views of cabinet secretaries and agencies, and sifting fact from speculation and rumor to help the new president decide how the United States should react to international crises.

    It is a role that is likely to take on outsize importance for Mr. Trump, who has no experience in defense or foreign policy issues and has a habit of making broad assertions that are not based in fact.

    Pause to think about that. It’s especially important for the next president to have a national security adviser who knows how to sift fact from speculation and rumor, because the  next president is a stupid and ignorant real estate tycoon who tells reckless lies all the time. It’s especially important for the next president to have a national security adviser who knows how to sift fact from speculation and rumor, because the  next president is a stupid and ignorant real estate tycoon who tells reckless lies all the time.

    Mr. Flynn, though, has shown similar inclinations both on Twitter and in regular life. His sometimes dubious assertions became so familiar to subordinates at the Defense Intelligence Agency that they came up with a name for the phenomenon: They called them “Flynn facts.”

    It’s enough to make you vomit from sheer terror.

  • A fire lit to hypnotize us

    Rex Huppke at the Chicago Tribune also called Trump a liar.

    On Sunday, the man who will soon lead this country tweeted a lie — a big, fiery one. It read: “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

    That statement is based on nothing. Actually, it’s based on less than nothing. Its origin is, roughly, this: A nobody Republican with zero credibility or evidence tweeted that 3 million people voted illegally; a conspiracy theory website reported on that tweet, taking it as fact; the president-elect, in need of a distraction, tweeted that information as fact with no citation, not that a citation would have made it any less false.

    Let’s pause for a moment and consider the staggering level of irresponsibility Trump showed in tweeting that lie. It’s akin to: My crazy uncle told me the world is flat; I reported that on my blog; the president of the United States then declared the world flat and banned boats so nobody would sail off the edge of the Earth.

    And the staggeringly irresponsible liar is the next president.

    Huppke says it’s a distraction, though, and that we should ignore it. Lots of people say that about Twitter-Trump, but I think they’re wrong – I think we need to pay attention to what a horrifying reckless monster the next president is on Twitter, because that is who he is. We should also of course pay attention to all the other horrors, and that’s hard to do because they’re so copious, but I don’t think Trump’s narcissistic public displays are a distraction or side show.

    There is reason to be irritated — and maybe even terrified — by the soon-to-be president of the most powerful country in the world sharing false information that draws the legitimacy of our electoral process into question. But, sadly, that’s the least of our concerns.

    It’s just a fire lit to hypnotize us, set by an arsonist who knows how to burn a narrative to the ground.

    No, sorry, we have to do it all.

    H/t Freemage

  • Reporting on the L word

    I mentioned that newspapers like the Times don’t call people liars lightly. For corroboration, here’s the Independent reporting on the very fact that the Times called Trump a liar.

    The headline is: New York Times brands Donald Trump a liar

    The New York Times has publicly accused Donald Trump of lying after he claimed millions of people had voted illegally in the US presidential election.

    …

    The New York Times used an editorial on Monday to attack Mr Trump’s claims.

    In the piece, published under the byline of the paper’s Editorial Board, it said: “This is a lie, part of Mr. Trump’s pattern, stretching back many years, of disregard for indisputable facts.

    “There is no evidence of illegal voting on even a small scale anywhere in the country, let alone a systematic conspiracy involving ‘millions’.

    “In addition to insulting law-abiding voters everywhere, these lies about fraud threaten the foundations of American democracy. They have provided the justification for state voter-suppression laws around the country, and they could give the Trump administration a pretext to roll back voting rights on a national scale.”

    Just a week ago Trump told Sulzberger to phone him when he got something wrong. Sulzberger of course did not agree to do that, because it would be grotesquely inappropriate. The Times – the whole Times, not a single commentator – is making it clear that it will report on his lies rather than coaxing him like a wayward child.

    Mr Trump has repeatedly attacked the New York Times, which endorsed Mrs Clinton for President. A week after his election he claimed the newspaper was “failing” and said its writers “looked like fools”.

    He had earlier said it was “losing thousands of subscribers because of [its] very poor and highly inaccurate coverage of the ‘Trump phenomena’”. The paper responded saying it had actually seen a rise in subscriptions.

    The row is the latest of Mr Trump’s attacks on US media outlets. On Tuesday he criticised news station CNN, tweeting: “I thought that CNN would get better after they failed so badly in their support of Hillary Clinton however, since election, they are worse!”

    “CNN is so embarrassed by their total (100%) support of Hillary Clinton, and yet her loss in a landslide, that they don’t know what to do.”

    Our own little Hitler.

  • The L word

    The Times again says Trump has been telling lies, which is something newspapers don’t do lightly.

    On Sunday, President-elect Trump unleashed a barrage of tweets complaining about calls for recounts or vote audits in several closely contested states, and culminating in this message: “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

    This is a lie, part of Mr. Trump’s pattern, stretching back many years, of disregard for indisputable facts. There is no evidence of illegal voting on even a small scale anywhere in the country, let alone a systematic conspiracy involving “millions.” But this is the message that gets hammered relentlessly by right-wing propaganda sites like InfoWars, which is run by a conspiracy theorist who claims the Sandy Hook school massacre was a hoax — and whose absurdities Mr. Trump has often shouted through his megaphone, which will shortly bear the presidential seal.

    That’s an appalling fact all by itself – the fact that the next president treats InfoWars as a reliable source.

    In addition to insulting law-abiding voters everywhere, these lies about fraud threaten the foundations of American democracy. They have provided the justification for state voter-suppression laws around the country, and they could give the Trump administration a pretext to roll back voting rightson a national scale.

    Could and doubtless will. If there’s a bad thing he can do, he will do it.