It never ceases to amaze that it wasn’t until Donald Trump came onto the scene that liberals in the national media discovered the concept of “lying.”
Thomas Edsall, typically the only columnist at the New York Times worth a damn, had an entire piece on Wednesday suggesting that — can you believe it? — politicians lie and voters know it!
What’s more, Trump as president has demonstrated that voters don’t care!
“A large segment of the American electorate has come to tolerate, and in many cases to willingly accept, politicians who lie,” wrote Edsall. “Double talk is key to Trump’s governing strategy.”
The idea that Trump lied his way into the White House and that he’s lying his way into a second term is a media fantasy.
If anything, Trump isn’t the reason millions of people are supposedly unbothered by lies. He’s the effect of years of the national media lying with impunity.
They’re always lying or instigating or inducing panic for no other reason than that it pays to keep readers and viewers in a constant state of anxiety.
Well, Trump was the relief to that sick cycle because though he does lie, nearly always about the most inconsequential things, he at least doesn’t screw everyone over by hobbling economic opportunity and snatching away their insurance under the guise of “expanding access to healthcare.”
When politicians do those things, the media react with a yawn. Yeah, too bad, but that’s how it goes!
But if Trump says something like “there’s a crisis at the border,” liberal journalists are horrified, absolutely horrified, that he would ever tell such a lie, though right up until that moment, they themselves had been calling it a crisis.
It’s as if they don’t think people can actually see for themselves that there really are hundreds of thousands of poor people from broken countries dumping themselves into the United States, where we’re expected to care for them.
No crisis there! Just Trump lying again!
The “Trump lies again” mantra is in itself an attempt by the media to mislead us. That ridiculous tally by the Washington Post and the New York Times purporting to track something like 1 billion lies told by the president every minute is simply a joke.
Edsall cited the Washington Post’s version in his column, so let’s take a look at it. Here’s an example of one of the “false or misleading claims” by Trump included in the list: “In many ways, this is the greatest economy in the HISTORY of America.”
The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler determined that to be a lie because, he said, “by just about any important measure, the economy today is not doing as well as it did under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson or Bill Clinton — or Ulysses S. Grant.”
My God, impeach! The president shared an opinion that I didn’t agree with! (Never mind that gross domestic product is higher than it’s ever been).
President Barack Obama in 2010 warned that we might be in a “new normal” in which unemployment remained high and companies simply refused to hire because “they’ve learned to do more with less.” New York Times liberal columnist Paul Krugman every week endorsed that mindset, championed Obama, and then said with complete certitude that Trump, if elected, would cause an irreparable global recession.
Krugman in August 2015: “Persistent global weakness is the new normal.”
Now, Krugman is admitting that, well, the economy is actually doing very well under this president. There are more jobs, unemployment is stunningly low, and companies are expanding.
So, who “lied” to the public? Was it Trump when he said we have the “greatest economy in the HISTORY of America,” or was it Krugman, who told us to accept the “new normal” that Obama believed in?
If Edsall is concerned about Trump taking advantage of voters who now accept lying as a matter of everyday politics, he doesn’t need to look at the president to figure out why. He needs to look at his own industry.
