Mother Jones
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I’ve gotten some pushback on my post about calling Donald Trump’s serial tall tales lying. The main objection is an obvious one: something is only a lie if you tell it knowingly. Trump tells lots of whoppers, but maybe he’s just misinformed. Or, in cases like the Jersey City Muslims, maybe he’s convinced himself that he really saw them cheering on 9/11. There’s no way to know for sure.
This is true: we can’t know for sure. But in Trump’s case we can be pretty damn sure. After all, this hasn’t happened once or twice or three times. It’s happened dozens of times on practically a daily basis. He doesn’t just tell these stories until somebody corrects him. He blithely keeps on telling them long after he must know they’re untrue. And while memory can fail, Trump has, by my count, told at least seven separate stories based on his own memory for which there is either (a) no evidence or (b) directly contradictory evidence.1 Some of them are for things that had happened only a few days or weeks before.
If you’re waiting for absolute, watertight, 100 percent proof of a knowing lie, you’ll probably never get it. But the case in favor of Trump being a serial liar is overwhelming—and in the fallen world in which we live, this is how adults have to make judgments about people. Given the evidence at hand, there’s simply no reasonable conclusion except one: Donald Trump is a serial liar.
1On my list of Trump fabrications, they are numbers 1, 6, 8, 13, 18, 19, and 26.
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