Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 07:21 pm
The four reasons why Donald Trump lies so much go to the heart of who Donald Trump really is; aka, what’s wrong with Donald Trump.
The Washington Post did a story on Trump’s 30 lies during a two day deposition in December of 2007. In the detailing of Trump being confronted with his falsehoods and asked to explain them, we find the real curiosity – the reasoning behind Trump’s lies.
The points that explain why Donald Trump lies so much are (my bold):
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1) In his mind. This is how Donald Trump sees the facts, whatever he thinks “in his mind” is real to him:
Trump said his personal math included the intangible value of publicity: The Learning Annex had advertised his speech heavily, and Trump thought that helped his brand. Therefore, in his mind he’d been paid more than $1 million, even though his actual payment was $400,000.
Trump claimed he never said Japan should have nukes, but he did.
2) If he’s wrong it’s someone else’s fault. Even when Trump is brought round to admit he was wrong, he is never at fault for said wrong. In the deposition, he blamed Meredith McIver, the same person he just recently blamed for his wife’s speech being plagiarized, for a large, misleading mistake about his debt load in a book they “co-wrote” called “How to Get Rich.â€
In some cases, Trump acknowledged he was wrong — but not that he was at fault. Instead, he sought to turn the blame on others.
We are now seeing this manifest in the holy trinity of Trump blame: Obama, Clinton, and the media. Trump blamed the media and Hillary Clinton for his own comments suggesting Hillary Clinton should be assassinated if she were to win and thus able to appoint Supreme Court justices.
Trump surrogate Trump Jr claimed his father had apologized to the Kahn family, but this isn’t true and Trump is still blaming the media for reporting his attacks on the Gold Star family.
3) Trump treats his “perception” of reality as reality, without any reason for his “perception”:
LAWYER: When you wrote, “O’Brien . . . threatened sources by telling them he can, quote, ‘Settle scores with enemies by writing negative articles about them,’ †what was the basis for that statement?
TRUMP: Just my perception of him.
I don’t know that he indicated anything like that to me, but I think he probably did indirectly. Just my dealing with him.
This is like Trump’s repeated false claim that President Obama founded ISIS. There is no factual basis for this claim, nor is there any way to make this sort of okay as conservative supporters have tried by saying the troop drawdown that happened under Obama created ISIS. Not only was that drawdown a part of the SOFA signed by Bush before he left office, but Iraq had a say in it. And no matter what, there is an actual founder of ISIS and it wasn’t George W Bush or President Barack Obama.
4) Trump claims things to be factual that he has no reason for thinking.
“What basis do you have for that statement?†Ceresney asked in one case, about an assertion from Trump that O’Brien had been reported to the police for stalking.
“I guess that was probably taken off the Internet,†Trump said.
We saw this when Trump claimed to have seen a video of a U.S. plane dropping off millions to Iran. There is no such video.
So the problem with Donald Trump isn’t even just that he lies so much the entire media can’t keep up with him, even when the task is divided. The problem with Donald Trump is why he lies.
Donald Trump lies because he doesn’t grasp that there are rules of evidence. Trump sees reality through the very distorted lens of his feelings and perceptions. He doesn’t bother to check these against the facts. Trump presents things as true and doesn’t care to learn if they are, indeed, true. They are true because he wants them to be.
This is what is wrong with Donald Trump, and it goes to his emotional challenges and mental inability to discern fact from fiction. All of Trump that comes from Trump is grandiose wish fulfillment. This is the sort of trait we find in tyrants.
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Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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