HALIFAX—Bad faith from politicians has always been a feature of democracy.

What politician hasn’t made a promise while running for office, only to break it when elected?

Scandal is as much a part of everyday governance as talking points and taxes.

From Brian Mulroney’s pasta payoff to Jean Chrétien’s ad sponsorship rip-off, leaders of all parties stray from the straight and narrow—and usually pay a reputational price.

But the triumph of lying in public life south of the border is a revolutionary change. With United States President Donald Trump, fiction, fantasy, and phoniness are the new substitutes for what used to be called telling the truth. 

Trump himself might describe his approach to communications as hyperbole. If he creates 100 jobs, he will claim 1,000. If he collects $10-billion in tariffs, he will announce $100-billion. If he narrowly wins an election, he will call it a landslide. 

If he thinks the GOP should have more congressional members from Texas, he just calls up the governor and asks him to re-district the electoral map. 

Trump probably reasons that his torqued version of reality and his outrageous actions create a bigger audience. They may misinform, but more importantly, they entertain. 

But hyperbole is just the euphemism Trump uses for something much different from exaggeration: garden-variety lying. 

Trump lies with a relentlessness and frequency unmatched in U.S. history. There was a time when Americans called out political liars. Then-president Bill Clinton had his worst moments in office after telling Americans, while under oath, that he didn’t have sexual relations with his 21-year-old intern Monica Lewinsky. He did.

In the run-up to a brutal invasion, then-president George W. Bush claimed that the U.S. had found weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. They didn’t. 

As president, Ronald Reagan insisted that the U.S. never sold weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages. He did.

And perhaps most famously, Richard Nixon denied “categorically” that anyone at the White House was involved in the break-in at the Watergate Hotel. That lie cost him his presidency.

But while other presidents and political figures have told the occasional lie, Trump is the undisputed king of the whopper. When he zig-zagged into scandal over a fling with a porn star, he denied knowing that his lawyer, Michael Cohen, had paid off Stormy Daniels so she wouldn’t talk about their sexual encounter. 

After E. Jean Carroll accused Trump of sexually assaulting her, Trump said he didn’t even know her. He was later convicted of sexual abuse and ordered to pay Carroll damages of US$88.3-million.

Trump not only lies with frightening regularity; he also never shows the remorse that other presidential liars have exhibited. Clinton, for example, publicly apologized on television to the American people over the Lewinsky affair. 

Compare that to Trump and his absurd claim that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election. After countless investigations, and more than 60 court cases, Trump’s claim proved to be baseless baloney. His response? To this day, he repeats the lie as if he were reading from the Bible.

He began his second administration with two astonishing lies. Trump claimed that he had inherited a broken economy and an “inflation nightmare” from former president Biden. In fact, the economy was in good shape, and inflation was not the catastrophe he claimed it was. 

Why does he do this when his facts are so plainly wrong and so easily revealed? This is what he told his press secretary about how to deal with the media: “It doesn’t matter what you say—say it enough and people will believe you.” 

Trump’s serial lying and reflexive confabulating may entertain his MAGA base, but they are far from harmless fodder for the faithful. The obvious losers are the ones he lies to: the American people. Democracy only works when the electorate is informed. 

How can that happen when the highest office in the land produces a torrent of misinformation on everything from Medicare cuts to the price of eggs? 

And there is another basic problem with putting a liar-in-chief in charge. When Trump spouts baseless conspiracy theories, he has the tools to treat them as if they were real. Under Trump’s Department of Revenge (formerly the Department of Justice), he has declared open season on his political opponents. 

Trump has used his spineless attorney general, Pam Bondi, and gutless Republicans in Congress to declare legal war on people like former president Barack Obama. 

Acting on information provided by Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, Bondi has ordered federal prosecutors to launch a grand jury investigation of Obama-era officials. 

Trump has always felt persecuted by the so-called “Russia” investigation that looked into allegations that Moscow interfered in the 2016 election to help him defeat Hillary Clinton. 

The allegation against the Obama-era officials is that they faked an intelligence report to show a connection between Trump and the Russians. Obama guilty of treason? As political stunts go, this one takes the cake. 

And it gets worse. Republicans in Congress have issued subpoenas for Bill and Hillary Clinton, and eight others, to delve into what they know about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Interestingly, Trump, whose name is all over the Epstein file, was not subpoenaed by the House oversight committee, nor did the committee subpoena Alex Acosta, the prosecutor who arranged the “sweetheart” deal for Epstein after his first arrest as a sex trafficker of underage girls. 

If Trump wanted to assist the House Oversight Committee in its work, the solution is simple. Just release all of the Epstein documents, and let the chips fall where they may. Instead, Trump has decided not to do that despite a loud and clear call from his base to do just that.

Trump’s response to the whole Epstein affair? He says it’s all a “hoax” and “bullshit” perpetrated by the Democrats.

Fittingly, another lie.

Michael Harris is an award-winning author and journalist.

The Hill Times

 

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