Trump world of lies

While Donald Trump played golf, the world heard the truth about him resonate during several world class eulogies, at the state funeral for Senator John McCain. 

Opinion echo published in The Meridian Star newspaper in Mississippi

Truth is truth; lies are lies

By Cokie Roberts and Steven V. Roberts

A small but significant line was crossed recently when the Washington Post's fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, called President Trump a liar for the first time.

He's cited the president for about 4,300 "false or misleading claims" since the inauguration, but as Kessler notes, "In many of those cases, it's not possible to tell whether Trump was intentionally fibbing or simply careless or wrong."

That all changed, writes Kessler, when the president's lawyer Michael Cohen pled guilty in federal court and provided "indisputable evidence that Trump lied" about his role in silencing two former girlfriends during the 2016 campaign.

"There's no question Trump lied – repeatedly, intentionally, over more than a year, enlisting top aides and advisers to further the deception," concluded the fact-checker.

Some ardent anti-Trumpers will tell Kessler, "What took you so long?" After all, as presidential historian Douglas Brinkley told the Toronto Star, "We've had presidents that have lied or misled the country, but we've never had a serial liar before. And that's what we're dealing with here."

Even Trump's own lawyers admit Brinkley's right, since they openly fear that if he talks to special counsel Robert Mueller, he'll lie under oath and commit perjury.

Moreover, many respected news outlets started using the L-word about Trump a long time ago. But Kessler is so careful and cautious that his shift marks another milestone in the increasingly determined and aggressive effort by the mainstream media to push back against the president and hold him accountable for his serial trashing of the truth.

As Marty Baron, Kessler's boss as editor of the Post, put it, "I think the public is looking for a press that stands for something, that stands for telling the truth, and will do it regardless of the pressures, and the people will support that."

That's an essential mission, but a very difficult one in the Age of Trump (aka "Trumpzism) – whose own lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, recently proclaimed on NBC's "Meet the Press" that "Truth isn't truth."

Trump's incessant attacks on the media as the "enemy of the peopleare deliberately designed to undercut the ability of fact-checkers like Kessler to correct and counter the president. And those attacks work. Gallup reports that 62 percent of Americans think the news they get is "biased."

CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl recalls asking Trump why he assails the press so vociferously: "And he said, 'You want to know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.'"

Trump doesn't just demean and discredit the mainstream press; he also simply goes around it, broadcasting his own bombastic broadsides – at any hour, with no filter – on what can only be called TBN, the Trump Broadcasting Network. He boasts at having more than 100 million followers on various social media platforms. Even if that's an exaggeration, he was correct when he told Stahl right after the election that social media gives him "a tremendous forum ... I have a method of fighting back."

What makes Trump even more dangerous is that he's a very good liar. He never corrects himself, never apologizes, and keeps repeating the same fabrications over and over again. TV reporter Billy Bush recounts this off-camera conversation with Trump: "He says, 'Billy, look, look, you just tell them and they believe it. That's it, you just tell them and they believe it. They just do.'"

Scientists who study human cognition know Trump is on to something. Writing in Politico, Maria Konnikova summarizes the research in the field: "When we are in an environment headed by someone who lies so often, something frightening happens: We stop reacting to the liar as a liar. His lying becomes normalized. We might even become likely to lie ourselves."

Wait, it gets worse. "Here's the really bad news for all those fact-checkers and publications hoping to counter Trump's false claims," she writes. "Repetition of any kind, even to refute the statement in question ... perversely reinforces the very claim it means to debunk."

So should folks like Kessler and Baron give up? Should they abandon their mission of telling the truth?

Absolutely not.

They have to be fair to Trump, and meticulously accurate. The L-word should never be used carelessly, but only when there's "indisputable evidence" that the president is deliberately deceiving people.

But Giuliani is wrong. Truth is truth. Facts are facts. Lies are lies. And the public needs and deserves journalists who will help them understand that.

Steve and Cokie Roberts can be contacted by email at stevecokie@gmail.com.

John Kelly ~ Lesson on immigration from Albany Georgia

Echo from Albany Georgia opinion published in the Albany Journal ~ immigration by Steve and Cokie Roberts

John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, recently told NPR that undocumented immigrants are “not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society. They’re overwhelmingly rural people. In the countries they come from, fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm. They don’t speak English; obviously that’s a big thing. … They don’t integrate well; they don’t have skills.”

Kelly is repeating the same nativist nonsense that was hurled at his own Irish and Italian ancestors generations ago. They were told they could not integrate into America, that they lacked the skills and intelligence to contribute to their adopted country — and especially to Kelly’s home city of Boston. Catholicism was actually illegal in Massachusetts until 1780, and a convent was burned to the ground there in 1834.

The haters were wrong about Kelly’s forebears, and Kelly is wrong about the latest wave of newcomers. If anything, immigrants are more productive than native-born Americans, according to virtually every economist who has ever studied the topic.

One example: The Council of Economic Advisors under President Bush 43 concluded, “Our review of economic research finds immigrants not only help fuel the nation’s economic growth, but also have an overall positive effect on the income of native-born workers.”

Kelly’s statement reflects a monumental ignorance of both economics and history, but he is only channeling the woefully warped mindset of President Trump, whose mother was born in Scotland and who has married two women from Eastern Europe. Like his chief of staff, the president embraces anti-immigrant attitudes rooted in fabrication, not fact, emotion, not evidence.

Trump doesn’t care about facts, because his real motivation is pure political opportunism: Fanning the fears of supporters who yearn for a more white, less diverse country with fewer neighbors from what Trump famously called “s—-hole countries.”

When John Feeley, Trump’s ambassador to Panama, quit in disgust, he wrote in the Washington Post: “I am convinced that the president’s policies regarding migration are not only foolish and delusional but also anti-American.” He is right, but Trump’s anti-immigrant crusade has only gotten more determined and more dangerous. Here are four examples:

— Abandoning Dreamers. A recent Harvard-Harris survey found that 76 percent of voters say that Dreamers, about 700,000 undocumented young people brought here as children, should be granted a path to citizenship. But Trump has torpedoed every attempt at a legislative compromise and no permanent solution is possible without his assent.

— Encouraging family separation. On the day that Melania Trump introduced a program to help children, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero-tolerance” policy for anyone caught trying to enter the country illegally. That means parents who are arrested at the border and sent to prison would be separated from their children, who are barred by law from incarceration.

--- The New York Times reports that at least 700 youngsters have been taken from adults claiming to be their parents since October. Michelle Brane of the Women’s Refugee Commission told the Times: “The idea of punishing parents who are trying to save their children’s lives … is fundamentally cruel and un-American.”

— Ending protected status. About 300,000 immigrants who fled natural disasters and civil strife in Haiti, Honduras and El Salvador enjoy temporary protected status under a program enacted in 1990 that allows them to stay in the U.S. Trump has canceled the program and ordered the migrants expelled, even though many of them have planted deep roots here and produced an estimated 273,000 American-born children.

The president rejected the advice of senior diplomats who encouraged him to keep the program because, as the Washington Post reports, “Money sent home by Central Americans and Haitians living in the United States is an engine for job creation that reduces the pressure to go abroad.”

— Deporting workers. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has stepped up raids on businesses that hire undocumented workers, making about 1,200 arrests since Oct. 1, which is up from about 300 during the previous fiscal year. This comes at a moment when the agricultural sector is plagued by a severe labor shortage. The Wall Street Journal documented the crisis in the crab industry on Maryland’s eastern shore and quoted a local fisherman, Burl Lewis: “It trickles all the way down the line. The Mexican labor creates jobs for Americans. It’s creating my job.”

Donald Trump, with John Kelly’s backing, is following an immigration policy that is not just “foolish and delusional (and) anti-American.” It also directly undermines the country’s economic future.

Steve and Cokie Roberts