PRESIDENT PINOCCHIO

By Robert P. Bomboy

[Published as a featured weekly column in the Shamokin, Pennsylvania, News-Item newspaper]

               The President of the United States lies. Blatantly. Continually. Almost every day.

During an impromptu White House news conference on February 23, President Trump took aim at reporters for what he called their “dishonesty.” He spent more than an hour accusing the media, but, as always, he couldn’t resist telling lies of his own.

He said, for instance:

ABOUT HIS ELECTION: “It was the biggest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan.”

Not So – He got 304 in the final Electoral College vote. In 2008, President Barack Obama won 365 Electoral College votes, and 332 Electoral College votes in 2012; President Bill Clinton won 370 Electoral College votes in 1992 and 379 in 1996; President George Bush won 426 Electoral College votes in 1988.

INHERITED A MESS: “Our administration inherited many problems across government and across the economy. To be honest, I inherited a mess.”

Not So – By most definitions, the economy is not a mess; nor is it in recession. The unemployment rate in January was 4.8 percent, compared with 7.8 percent in January 2009, before Barack Obama took office as President. This January, the economy added 227,000 jobs, even though the unemployment rate is already low. The number of people filing new claims for unemployment benefits continues to hit lows that are lower than any we’ve seen in decades. As for “problems across government” do you recall anything over the past eight years that would match the chaos of President Trump’s first month in office? I don’t, and I’m a pretty close observer.

FIRST TRAVEL BAN: “Let me tell you about the travel ban. We had a very smooth rollout of the travel ban."

Not so - By most measures, that is far from true. The President went on to say that, aside from a federal district judge's decision to temporarily halt the ban, its rollout had been "perfect." Even senior Republicans who agreed with the immigration ban's goals said it had been poorly implemented and had sown confusion by being overly broad.

These were only a few of the President’s habitual lies. If you have the patience, there’s a way to see an outline of the President’s pinocchios over the first seven weeks of his administration:

            PolitiFact is a Pulitzer Prize-winning online project of sunny Florida's Tampa Bay Times newspaper, in which reporters and editors from the Times and affiliated media outlets fact-check statements by members of Congress, the White House, presidential candidates, lobbyists, and interest groups. The fact-checker gave Donald Trump its Lie-of-the-Year award in 2015 and considered him for the same award in 2016, saying no other major politician had a worse record for accuracy, with more than70 percent of his claims rated Mostly False, False, or Pants on Fire.

            If you look at PolitiFact today you'll see:

January 26, 2017: In a speech in Philadelphia, President Trump said, "Here in Philadelphia murder has been steady - I mean just terribly increasing."

But the number of murders in Philadelphia actually decreased in 2016, and has been slowly decreasing since at least 2007, police records show.

January 27, 2017: On immigration for refugees from Syria, President Trump said, "If you were a Muslim, you could come in [to the U.S.], if you were a Christian, it was impossible."

            There is no evidence for this claim that it was impossible for Syrian Christians to enter the U.S.

February 6, 2017: President Trump said, "109 out of hundreds of thousands of travelers" were affected by the first immigration order.

The real number of travelers affected was at least 60,000.

February 6, 2017: President Trump said, “Terrorism and terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe “have gotten to the point where it’s not even being reported.”

            He was obviously wrong, as anyone with a TV knows: Attacks in the U.S. - including the 2015 attack in San Bernardino, California, and the attacks on an Orlando nightclub, a New York City street, and a college campus in Columbus, Ohio - got heavy media attention, often including live coverage for hours at a time and continuing coverage for days afterward. In Europe, big terrorist attacks including major incidents in Paris, Brussels, and the French city of Nice, also got extensive coverage in the United States.

February 8, 2017: The President said, “The murder rate in our country is the highest it’s been in 47 years.”

            The national murder rate is considerably lower than its all-time peak in the 1990s.

February 16, 2017: The President said, “The news media has a lower approval rate than Congress.”

            Congress actually ranks below the news media, according to surveys from three different research groups spanning several years.

            I’m sure you remember Pinocchio the puppet who became a child but, falling for the temptations that humans face, saw his nose grow longer with every lie he told.

President Trump has no respect for the truth. He leads the parade of fake news. He lies every time he says, “The news media is the enemy of the American people.” He hates the New York Times, which is respected by intelligent people everywhere as a paragon of honesty and whose reporters and editors are disciplined every day to be faithful to the truth.

It’s no wonder he hates the Times, which caught him in 31 big lies in a single week and continually fact-checks his lies.

He and his ilk have a plan to undercut the foundations of our democracy, anathema to Thomas Jefferson, who said, "Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it."

            Which of us raised our children to lie? Who among us has any respect at all for liars?

            How did we come to this.