fact
noun
- something that actually exists; reality; truth: Your fears have no basis in fact.
- something known to exist or to have happened: Space travel is now a fact.
- a truth known by actual experience or observation; something known to be true: Scientists gather facts about plant growth.
Lying is problematic. I speak as an accomplished liar. I learned the skill of lying early in life. Used lies to keep the machine that is a nuclear family running. I won’t go into all the details in this post because it isn’t primarily about me. This post is primarily about the idea that lying is toxic. Someone much smarter than I am has said it better than I can.
“Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship.”
― Sam Harris, Lying
Donald Trump is a liar in charge of a team of hand picked liars. No matter how many times you make a false claim, it is still not true. Alternative facts do not exist. Whether or not you voted for Trump, it is problematic that his campaign was one made up of lies, and that he is (unsurprisingly) kicking off his presidency with more lies.
The Trump team’s most recent lie has been to make the false claim that his inauguration was the best attended in the history of U.S. inaugurations. Lie. It is an important lie? You might not think so. I think all lies are important because they chip away at reality. Should a president be busily engaged in creating a false reality? I think that is extremely dangerous. Estimates from people I trust more than Trump tell me that about 160,000 people attended his inauguration while about 470,000 protested it the next day in the same city. This doesn’t count all the people elsewhere in the world who are concerned about Donald Trump holding the most powerful position in the most powerful country in the world.
The Washington Post recently reported that of 52 claims made by Trump during the election cycle, only four percent could be verified as completely factual. That means 96% of the things Trump was saying when he was campaigning for the highest office in the land were either only partially true or were outright lies. Does that bother you? It certainly bothers me. In fact, it terrifies me.
Trump doesn’t live in the same reality I am in. He exists in a world of lies that continuously pour out of his mouth. In fact, he lies so much I suspect he is at the point where the lying is pathological. Either that or Trump is a sociopath with antisocial personality disorder. Those afflicted with the mental condition know they are lying but aren’t bothered by it. These are the kind of people who claim that someone they raped ‘wanted it’ because they were wearing provocative clothing. People who do this need are extremely dangerous and have a disproportionately negative effect on society and its institutions.
A president who refuses to cooperate with others and presents ‘alternative facts’ is not a president I want in power. People who do this cannot be ignored because they are busy trying to reshape reality in their own image and that ripples out into society in ways that are likely to tear it apart. I’m making a prediction that this carefully crafted false reality is only just starting to grow like a cancer in the belly of our country. If we allow it to go untreated, it remains to be seen how many people will needlessly suffer as a result. In world where there is more than enough to go around so that everyone can have food, shelter and access to medical care, Trump is the antithesis of making anything great. He’s more likely to foolishly start the third and possibly last great war our species will fight.
I’m with all those who are against our new liar in chief. Things are going to get much worse before they get better. Today, I can still openly complain about the problems with the new administration. I suspect that, if we are not ready to fight to keep things this way, voices like mine will be silenced one by one until the only voices left are the ones currently holding the power. I’m willing to fight to keep that from becoming a reality. I’m not willing to pay for any new walls, and I’m not willing to be quiet while others are forced to pay for them.