As It Turns Out, the Fake News is Coming from the Trump Administration
Most politicians are guilty of lying, manipulating the truth, or massaging statistics to create a message that fits with their agenda. President Trump and his administration have taken lying to another level, using lies so often that it must be viewed as a conscientious effort to deceive the public. If one considers how the Trump administration repeatedly bypasses conventional media to use Twitter to communicate directly with people, it becomes clear that it is a way to dispense fiction without the pesky filter of fact-checkers, reporters, and proper sourcing. It becomes easier for Trump to describe the Twitter narrative as unfiltered “truth” and news reports as biased reports riddled with lies. The reality is that Trump consistently lies and repeats those lies himself and through surrogates hoping that repetition will bring an air of credibility. For those people unskilled in discerning legitimate news sources from unsourced rhetoric, the repetitive deceptions become reality. According to politifact.com, a non-partisan website that ranks politicians based upon the various levels of truthfulness of their statements, Donald Trump is one of the most dishonest politicians that ever existed. Let’s take a look at the breakdown of Trump’s statements:
Most interesting is not the sheer quantity of lies dispensed from the administration, but the fact that they lie when it is wholly unnecessary. For example, January 21, 2017 - White House press secretary Sean Spicer falsely claimed the crowd on the National Mall was “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration.” Not only was the crowd for Trumps’ inauguration not the largest crowd present for an inauguration, it wasn’t even close. “In 2009, an estimated 1.8 million people attended Obama’s first inauguration. In 2013, the number attending Obama’s second was estimated at 1 million, making that the third largest. About 1.2 million people are believed to have attended the swearing-in of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965.” (1) Trump had approximately half of the attendees of LBJ’s inauguration, roughly 600,000 people, and that is a friendly estimate. (2) Let’s look at some inauguration attendance totals and see where Trump fits in to the chart:
(3 - chart above)
Another metric which can be used to gauge crowd size is the number of metro rides on inauguration day. In attempting to downplay the attendance at President Obama’s 2013 inauguration, Spicer lied about the number of metro rides on that day. “The actual numbers are 783,000 trips for Obama in 2013 — more than double Spicer’s figure — and 571,000 for Trump in 2017. There were 1.1 million trips for Obama in 2009, the biggest day in Metro’s history. The number for Trump is actually lower than the average weekday ridership of 639,000 trips.” (4)
If roughly 600,000 people did attend Trump’s inauguration, then that is a respectable figure when compared with other presidents’ inaugural attendance. So why does Trump and his administration feel the need to lie unnecessarily? What is emerging is a pattern of boastful lies that portray the president as someone hopelessly controlled by his ego and unable to tell the truth if it requires an admission of inferiority. The comparisons of the 2009 and 2013 Obama inaugurations to Trump’s inauguration clearly bothered Trump, and he was unable to respond in a truthful manner.
Trump is a clear and present danger to our nation, and is unfit to hold office.
Sources:
4 -
