Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth

Starred review from May 15, 2020
All politicians lie. But the current occupant of the White House? Yikes.... Kessler, editor of the Washington Post "Fact Checker" column, allows that every recent president is associated with "one big lie"--e.g., not having sex with "that woman," fudging about overflights over the Soviet Union, dismissing concerns about illness. Donald Trump is transcendent. He is, by Kessler and his colleagues' account, "the most mendacious president in U.S. history," the author not of one big and sometimes necessary lie but of thousands of little, useless ones. As of the third anniversary of his inauguration, they reckon, the lie count was 16,241--which means that Trump publicly lied 15 times per day on average, though some days were richer than others, such as November 5, 2018, which rang in 139 false claims. The lies are part of a program of an attack on truth, the authors assert, and given that "Republicans have grown less concerned about presidents being honest than they were a decade ago," the lies find a willing audience. Parsing those 16,241 lies, the Post staffers calculate that immigration is the single subject most liable to be lied about, "accounting for 15 percent of the total...we fact-checked in the first three years of Trump's presidency." But everything else is fair game, too, with concomitant fits of projection--accusing others of lying, for instance--and refusal to accept responsibility for anything except the rare success. Then there are the simple misunderstandings, as when he called his impeachment "illegal and unconstitutional" even though, Kessler and company observe, "it's literally spelled out in the Constitution." Most valuable, in this rather depressing catalog of untruths, are the fact checkers' point-by-point analyses, lie by lie, of the relative falsehoods uttered, measured by "Pinocchios." They even give Trump credit for those extremely unusual moments when his outbursts are "mostly accurate." Readers will want to add in the many COVID-19 falsehoods, but all in all, this is an extremely valuable chronicle.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

June 15, 2020
President Trump made 16,241 “false or misleading” statements between taking office on Jan. 20, 2017, and Jan. 20, 2020, according to the staff of the Washington Post’s Fact Checker. In this comprehensive yet stultifying survey, Fact Checker editor Glenn Kessler and reporters Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly document Trump’s “most egregious and important false claims” (Mexico will pay for the border wall), as well as more obscure distortions (he negotiated peace between Ethiopia and Eritrea), explain why they’re off-base, and look for patterns to understand why and how he twists the truth and how it’s affected his presidency. The authors also discuss the difficulties of applying the Fact Checker’s “Pinocchio scale” (one Pinocchio for “selective telling of the truth”; four for “a whopper”), which was created in 2007 to evaluate specific claims made in order to advance policy agendas, to a president whose supporters seem unperturbed by his “constant stream” of falsehoods and exaggerations. Though illustrated with insightful sidebars and graphs, the book’s analysis doesn’t go far beyond noting that Trump’s mendacity has roots in his real estate and entertainment careers, and is not the liability it would be for other politicians. Readers will be more exhausted than enlightened.