Now he lies about milk?

When is a "half-truth" a lie?

Mar 22, 2025

March 22, 2025

There ain’t nothin’ more powerful than the odor of mendacity!
Big Daddy Pollitt, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ~ by Tennessee Williams

Trump’s predisposition to “stretch the truth” is well known and well documented. We have all watched in amazement, or horror, as totally fabricated stories have grown to unthinkable size, consuming news cycles, then everyone around him, then metastasize to consume entire political parties. Or at least one political party. There is no doubt in my mind that college courses will someday be structured around the scope and scale of Trump’s mendacity, from his days of posing as his own publicist, using names like John Barron and John Miller, to call into New York radio stations and newspapers to promote his own made-up versions of his exploits around town, to the present where there are actually numerous websites just trying to keep count of his fabrications.

It was humorous, back in the day, to read the stories about this self-promoting local Queens real estate developer pulling up a chair at the dais of some nonprofit fund raiser, as if he was a patron of the event and had contributed or been invited. It was just Trump being Trump. No harm, no foul. It’s quite another when your lies about winning a presidential election take on a life of their own, consuming entire media companies, one political party, and quite possibly the future of the country. That future college course curriculum will have to cover the motivation to do all of this, beyond the obvious—pursuit of money and power. What makes an individual say something that is easily proved false, and then continue to repeat it over and over after he has been shown that what he is saying is untrue? Some of these are of little consequence—Mexico is going to pay for the wall! What wall? Who cares? Some would be scary if true, but they are not. Some are more substantial, statements like:

"The ‘Pardons’ that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen," Trump wrote March 17 on Truth Social.

I love when Trump uses the word “hereby”. You just know that the word is going to be followed up by a doozy. I can’t help thinking of him thinking of himself as a Pharoah, ala Yul Brynner. “Let it be written! Let it be done!”

I am getting a little tired of the “Sleepy Joe” stuff. It is, at the very least, unpresidential, but who am I kidding? Consider the source. “Unselect” Committee is Trump’s way of delegitimizing, in his typical schoolyard style, the Select Committee that studied his complicity in the January 6^th insurrection and attack on the Capitol. “Political thugs?” Just a Trumpian term of endearment for any politico who refuses to bend the knee.

The Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact labeled the President’s statement as “False”. There is no constitutionally mandated requirement for having a personalized “wet” signature on Presidential pardons (as is the case with the signing of legislation). They can, in fact, be oral. Mechanical signature devices have been used by prior presidents going back to Thomas Jefferson, and include recent Presidents Obama and John Kennedy. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has stated that a hand signature is not required. Trump not only alleged that President Biden’s pardon was illegitimate because of the use of an autopen—but that President Biden was not even aware of the pardon! I have so many issues with this story, on so many levels, that I really don’t even know where to begin. I am not at all surprised that he did this, or attempted to do this. Nothing the man does surprises me at this point. My first question is, why would anyone do this, knowing that it will be immediately challenged and found to be lacking any power of enforcement? Does he really believe that some secret cabal of ne’er do wells went behind President Biden’s back to orchestrate the issuance of pardons for Liz Cheney and the other members of the J-6 Committee? Did he not think that someone might call Joe Biden and ask? Did he not think to call Joe Biden himself and ask? OK, maybe ask a staff member to call, but still….

When Trump was sworn in as President, conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks commented that he “…was mostly morally appalled. It was like watching Larry Flynt get elected pope.” For me, listening to President Trump is more like listening to comedian Jon Lovitz’s iconic SNL character Tommy Flanagan, who was a pathological liar of epic and very comic proportions. (I’m dating myself; I know.) There is, of course, nothing funny about Trump’s lying, but the extremes to which he mangles truth is almost incomprehensible. It makes absolutely no sense to constantly be making obviously and objectively false statements that are easily fact checked.

The Poytner Institute’s PolitiFact does not focus just on Trump, their mission is to check the veracity of statements made by any and all politicians. President Trump, of course, will consider PolitiFact to be “fake news” and biased, just as he considered the fact checking process to be biased during the 2024 Presidential debate with Vice President Harris. “It was a rigged deal” he said, “as I assumed it would be, because when you looked at the fact that they were correcting everything and not correcting her.” Trump considered the fact that his statements were fact checked more than Vice President Harris’s to be evidence of media bias. No consideration given, of course, to the possibility that he was spewing lies most of the night and she wasn’t. Trump withdrew from a second debate because he said that his campaign was promised that there would not be any fact checking, but that the network had subsequently reneged on that promise. He complained that he considered it unfair to check the truthfulness of his answers!

PolitiFact analyzed 1081 statements made by President Trump over the last five years and ranked them in five categories of truthfulness—or not. The categories ranged from “True” to “Pants on Fire” (Laughably not true?) Of the 1081 statements, a grand total of thirty six—three percent— were rated as “True”. Chew on that for a moment—3%! Another seven percent were rated “Mostly True”. Eleven percent were “Half True”. (More on this in a moment.) Nineteen percent were “Mostly False”. Thirty nine percent were “False”, and eighteen percent were “Pants on Fire” (bigly false with an exclamation point). In other words, the majority of the things that come out of the man’s mouth are lies and a good portion of those are so far out there that even his supporters cannot believe them.

What, exactly, is the difference between a “half-truth” and a lie? I’ll refer to recent Trump statements regarding Canadian tariffs on US milk exported to Canada as an example. This story has made headlines here in the north country of upstate New York, which is part of the 21st Congressional District. The congressional representative in that district is Elise Stefanik, Trump’s choice to become UN Ambassador. The Democratic candidate in the race to replace her, Blake Gendebien, is a dairy farmer from St. Lawrence County, near the Canadian border. I wrote about this “Race for NY-21” in last week’s newsletter.

President Trump has alleged that Canada charges US milk producers tariffs of over 200% on milk exports. The reality is a lot more complicated. The rules governing these charges were originally negotiated as part of the 2018 USMCA / US- Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement, negotiated by the Trump administration, which up until this year, was described by Trump as “The best trade deal ever made”. How Trumpian, but apparently not so much anymore. Now he says the Canadians are picking our pockets with 250% tariffs on milk exported to Canada. The rest of the real story is that the said-aforementioned 250% tariff is levied on milk exported to Canada if the volume of imported milk exceeds a quota set by the Canadians, currently around $1 billion dollars. Last year milk exported to Canada was approximately half that amount, so the total tariff levied on US milk exported to Canada was…..zero. There were, in fact, no tariffs levied on US milk exported to Canada. The calculation of that Canadian milk import quota is an entirely different discussion, but the fact remains that the President’s statements about 250% tariffs are false, or at best totally misleading. What is the difference between a “half-truth” and a lie? Absolutely nothing.

“Repetition does not transform a lie into truth.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt

It is not my mission to convince anyone reading this that Donald Trump has a very casual relationship with the truth. I am quite sure that anyone paying attention is already aware of that. My quest is to try and understand why anyone would act like this. You have more money than you could ever possibly spend. You have more power than anyone else on the planet. Why are you doing this? Now hold that thought and multiply that level of incredulity by the number of supporters and enablers and Republican politicians and Fox News anchors who know all of this perfectly well but go along with the charade. Still. They know that they are all lying. They know that we know that they are all lying. They know we have the videos of their prior comments and speeches and text messages that they have had to turn over in court, all denouncing Trump’s behavior at some point in the past during a brief moment of lucidity.

Last month the Trump administration set in motion a plan to fire FBI agents who had been assigned to investigate complicity in the January 6^th insurrection and attack on the Capitol. Not that it should matter, but as it was reported these agents did not act of their own volition to go out and start investigating the seditionists; they were assigned to the case by their superiors. To perpetuate his Big Lie, that he won the 2020 election and that the J-6 seditionists were justified in attacking the Capitol to stop the counting of the electoral ballots, Trump wants to eliminate anyone left in authority who has a knowledge of what actually happened—the truth.

This behavior goes far beyond just lying, and the suggestions of some, that Trump is a pathological liar or a narcissistic liar, who might or might not even be aware that he is lying. His firing people at the Department of Justice or terminating long serving FBI agents who were just following orders and doing their job— investigating potential federal crimes that the President appears to have been involved in, is an admission of culpability and in my (non-legal) mind, indicia of guilt. The Supreme Court may have given him permission to behave like a criminal in the commission of his duties as president, but in any other time, with any other Congress, this behavior would be an impeachable offense. As it should be. It is morbidly fascinating to watch as the entire US political arena descends into a morass of deception, all built on blatant fabrications and lies. This is the world we now live in, and this story cannot end well.

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The most important article that I read this week:

THE NEW YORKER INTERVIEW

HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS WILL DIE

By David Remnick

The writer, surgeon, and former U.S.A.I.D. senior official Atul Gawande on the Trump Administration’s decimation of foreign aid and the consequences around the world.

https://player.simplecast.com/53c3a56a-82d2-4a3a-a423-11ee95c272c2?dark=false

Also available as part of an Apple News + subscription / magazines.

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