Trump's Lies

 

Here’s a riddle. The number one complaint about Trump on the left is that he lies. The Washington Post claims to catalogue 30,573 “lies or misleading claims” over his first term; a “tsunami of untruths.”

Examples:

“He overstated the ‘carnage’ he was inheriting, then later exaggerated his ‘massive’ crowd and claimed, despite clear evidence to the contrary, that it had not rained during his address. He repeated the rain claim the next day, along with the fabricated notion that he held the ‘all-time record’ for appearing on the cover of Time magazine.”

Yet, according to a recent poll, those who support Trump trust him to tell the truth more than they trust religious leaders, their friends, or even their own family.

These views directly contradict one another. How is this possible? Are we experiencing different truths?

Exactly.

The claim that Trump lies is intrinsically dubious. All politicians lie; Joe Biden will say anything. So will Justin Trudeau. So why this peculiar focus on Trump? Surely Trump is being held to a different standard here.

And note the lies the Post first cites to make their case: whether or not it was raining during his inauguration. Whether he holds the record for most Time cover stories. A claim that he exaggerated America’s problems. They seem oddly trivial. Would you call an acquaintance a liar for thinking it rained when it had not?

Here’s how the paradox is solved: the left, those who oppose Trump, are likely to embrace postmodernism and the dogma that there is no objective truth; only “my truth” and “your truth.” So that a man can declare himself a woman, and that becomes incontestably true.

When they say Trump “lies,” what they really mean is that he is not endorsing “their truth”: what they wish were true. He refuses to go along with their preferred “narrative,” which is to say, fiction.

Interestingly, Trump is apparently not entitled to a pass on the premise that he is asserting “his truth.” 

This is a backhanded admission that he is not asserting “his truth,” but truth itself. He refuses to lie, and that is what is intolerable.