If Donald Trump was not scheduled to become the next President of the United States in 11 days, I would find a way to ignore him and the lies he tells on an almost daily basis. Plenty of people get on Twitter and bloviate and exaggerate and lie, but only one of them is about to become one of the most powerful men in the world.
Donald Trump is a liar.
That’s not normal. Well, it’s normal for him to lie, but it is not normal for the incoming President to be a stone cold liar. That’s what he is. I’ve never seen anything like it.
He regularly and consistently looks us right in the face and lies to us. Either he has no moral compass and simply does not mind lying, which I believe is imminently possible, or he lies so often that he has a hard time telling the truth from a lie. It’s likely a combination of both of those things. Whatever the case, it’s disturbing.
Meryl Streep takes down Trump with epic Golden Globes speech
I don’t think I can think of one human being I’ve ever seen or heard in my life who has lied more often, about a wider variety of topics, covering more ground, than Donald Trump. I highlighted the sheer range of his lies just a month ago.
“Over the course of the primaries and presidential campaign, PolitiFact, the widely respected, Pulitzer Prize winning nonpartisan political watchdog, evaluated 340 different statements made by Donald Trump. Sixty-one of them were outrageous “pants on fire” lies. An astounding 114 of them were absolutely false. Another 63 were mostly false. That means 70% of the unique statements made by Donald Trump and fact-checked by Politifact were mostly false, completely false, or outrageous lies. Another 51 of those statements were deemed to be only half true. When it was all said and done, only 4% of what Donald Trump said was determined to be completely true.”
No politician they’ve ever evaluated has been so dishonest. That’s staggering. To be clear, they don’t editorialize. They simply take the truth, compare it up against what people say, and give it a grade. They do this to politicians of every party and persuasion and deemed that 96% of what Donald Trump says is some type of falsehood.
This morning he has done it again. It’s ugly and unacceptable.
Donald Trump says Meryl Streep 'over-rated' in Twitter rant
Meryl Streep gave an emotional speech at Sunday night’s Golden Globes about Donald Trump’s bullying ways.
(Handout/Getty Images)Last night, Meryl Streep, in an acceptance speech for a lifetime achievement award that she won at the Golden Globes, reminded the audience that our incoming President once openly mocked a reporter with a physical disability from the stage of a rally. Poignant, with her voice cracking, Streep said
“But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hook in my heart not because it was good. It was — there was nothing good about it, but it was effective, and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter, someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back.
It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out of my head because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.”
We all knew Trump would reply. He has to. His skin is so thin, his temper so short, that few insults go unnoticed. His response, though, was not simply insulting, it was, as expected, another lie. It’s what he does.
We saw Donald Trump mock Serge Kovaleski of the New York Times with our own eyes. When it happened at a public rally last year, it was widely covered all over the world. It is unmistakably clear that he is mocking Kovaleski. It’s why we have never seen Trump move his arms in such a fashion before or after the incident. He was imitating the man and mocking the limited flexibility and mobility of his arms caused by arthrogryposis.
Trump has now outrageously said he has no recollection of ever meeting Kovaleski and was not aware of his disability, but that is another outrageous lie. He did not meet Kovaleski once or twice. He did not meet him three or four times, or even half a dozen times, but met with Kovaleski at least a dozen times across the years. They met in Trump’s office, at events, and at press conferences. They were so close that Kovaleski described them as being “on a first name basis for years.”
Again, this is not normal.
To fight back against Streep reminding us of what he did, Trump is lying about lies about lies. His lies have so many layers that it often seems like he gets lost and simply cannot keep up. And, in the speech where Trump mocked Kovaleski, it was not just the physical movements that Trump made, but the very words that came of his mouth that tell us he knew full well what he was doing when he mocked the man. Trump said at that 2015 rally, “Now the poor guy, you ought to see this guy,” right before he began his physical impression of Kovaleski’s disability.
Donald Trump mocked a reporter with a disability at a rally on Nov. 24, 2015.
(CNN)Few lies seem more relevant right now than Trump’s repeated lies about his relationship with Vladimir Putin.
I edited this video last month showing his blatant lies about it. In two presidential debates with Hillary Clinton and in his final press conference, which was seven months ago, Donald Trump repeatedly stated “I don’t know Putin” and “I don’t know anything about him,” but in a 2013 interview, Trump was asked, “Do you have a relationship with Vladimir Putin, a conversational relationship, or anything where you feel you have sway or influence over his government?”
Nodding his head affirmatively throughout the question, Trump replied, without hesitation, “I do have a relationship. And I can tell you that he’s very interested in what we’re doing here today. He’s probably very interested in what you and I are saying today. And I’m sure he’s going to be seeing it in some form, but I do have a relationship with him.”
Again, this is deeply problematic. Throughout the campaign, Trump not only said he’d never met Putin, but that he didn’t even “know anything about him.” But outside of the campaign trail, when he was asked the same thing just a few years ago, he spoke very earnestly and specifically about their “relationship.”
Whether Trump wants to accept it or not, some things are true and some are not.
Donald Trump has lied about everything from his well-documented mocking of a disabled reporter to his relationship with Vladimir Putin.
(ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images)If you say in 2016 that you don’t know anything about Vladimir Putin, but said in 2013 that you had a “relationship” and had influence with him, then you were either lying then or are lying now.
When Trump told Billy Bush that he forces himself on women, kisses them whether they like it or not, then grabs their genitals, he was either lying to Billy Bush, which seems like the strangest set of lies in the world to tell, or he lied to the world when he said he never really did any of those things to women. Either way, at the root of the matter, which is a clear trend for Trump, are lies — scores and scores of them.>
Our incoming President of the United States is a liar. He tells them often. He lies far more often than he tells the truth. We must call him out on it. We must not become desensitized to his lies. We must not get so used to them that they become normal to us.
One of the most dishonest men on earth is about the become our leader. I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t deeply concerned about what comes next.
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