1,318 Lies In 263 Days: Trump And The Heartless Exploitation Of A Hopeless Base

Who likes being lied to?

Hopefully, if we posed that question in person to a random sample of American voters, we’d end up with a crowd full of full pockets (i.e. no raised hands).

But here’s the thing about being lied to. No one likes to admit it when they’ve been duped. No one willingly concedes to having been conned. That unwillingness becomes more entrenched in proportion to i) how important the issue is, and ii) the length of time spent and amount of mental effort expended on suspending disbelief. Implicit in that latter point is the idea that after a certain amount of time has passed and after a certain amount of energy has been expended, there’s no turning back – you’re pot committed. Admitting the truth is simply too painful. Better to just go down with the ship.

That’s the situation quite a few Trump voters find themselves in these days. It is painfully obvious that the President isn’t fit to serve. It is also painfully obvious that he is and always has been a habitual liar.

Note we said “painfully” obvious. That gets back to the points made above. It is painful for people who have invested so much (in some cases literally in the form of campaign contributions) in this man to have to watch as Trump is exposed for what everyone who has followed his “career” (if that’s what you want to call it) already knew he was: a textbook narcissist with virtually no business acumen whatsoever and almost nothing upstairs in the form of either book smarts or street smarts (someone tell Rex to take Trump up on that IQ challenge).

Perhaps the most painful part of this for Trump’s support base is that thanks in no small part to his daily assaults on the free press, the media isn’t letting anything slide anymore. Not even for a day. That’s what happens when you make an enemy of everyone. For instance, to the extent Trump was already embarrassed by the Bob Corker fiasco, things got immeasurably worse for him when, just hours after tweeting that the Tennessee Senator had been “set up” by The New York Times, the Times released the actual tape revealing that not only was Corker fully on board with being recorded, he was actually recording the interview himself via an assistant. Unless you want to claim that’s not actually Bob Corker’s voice, or else that Bob Corker was somehow in on setting himself up, then the only conclusion you can come to is that the President of the United States knowingly told a lie about a powerful Senator from his own party on Twitter.

Even more egregious than that is how Trump is swindling his support base by soliciting small contributions from people like Martha Adams, a 70-year-old, retired speech pathologist from Austin and Gwynne Abrams, an unemployed nanny in Henderson, Nev., who recently gave $78 to Trump’s committee. It would be bad enough if he were taking money out of the pockets of unemployed nannies to advance an agenda that is in no way, shape or form designed to benefit working class Americans. But when you find out that some of that money is likely being diverted to pay his attorney fees incurred in connection to the Russia probe, the whole thing is just downright – dare we say it? – “deplorable.”

The Washington Post – among other media outlets – has been keeping track of Trump’s false and misleading claims. As of Tuesday, WaPo‘s count has Trump making 1,318 demonstrably false or misleading claims over just 263 days in office. He is lying to the American public more than five times every single day.

And it’s not just that he’s lying. He’s lying about everything. From the election, to domestic policy, to foreign policy, to the economy, to Russia, to taxes, to guns, to trade, and on, and on. Here’s the “all topics” chart:

WaPo has all 1,318 of these claims catalogued, broken down by topic, and accompanied by details and explanations including how and why they are either false or at best, misleading. You can review the entire database here (there’s an interactive version of the chart shown above as well).

Of course that’s the problem. The people who need to review that database invariably won’t, because doing so is far too painful. The only people who will click that link are the people who have known from the start that this was all a charade built on hyperbole, absurd promises, populist pandering, and a steady stream of the very same lies documented in the chart above.

Indeed, Trump even had the nerve to claim that his tax plan won’t benefit him (“believe me”, he said), when a simple check of the available information shows that he will benefit to the tune of $1.1 billion (with a “b”). And the funniest thing about that is, the only reason we can’t put an even more precise figure on it is because he refuses to release his most recent returns, most likely because they would reveal that he’s been lying about all kinds of other things.

But again, people are pot committed. They can’t turn back now. The emotional shock of admitting what some part of them knows to be true would be overwhelming not only for what it says about the President, but also for what it would suggest about their own susceptibility to being conned.

The saddest part for those people: persisting in the fantasy means standing idly by as Trump and the GOP take away their healthcare, pass tax cuts for the wealthy, and spend a quarter of a million dollars of taxpayer money to send Mike Pence to NFL games just so that same Mike Pence can turn around 24 hours later and take $5 more dollars from those same taxpayers’ pockets.