Sky Views: Trump’s porkies pose a serious danger – By Greg Milam (skynews.com) / April 30 2018
Donald Trump prides himself on “telling it like it is”.
Except that, almost every day, he does the exact opposite.
Maybe it isn’t breaking news that the current US President says things that are not true.
But his relentless, corrosive onslaught of untruths should worry us all.
Call them lies, call them exaggerations, call them mistakes, call them whatever you want, from the leader of the free world they pose a serious danger.
Daniel Dale, the Washington DC based correspondent for the Toronto Star newspaper, tweets out a regular tally of how many “untrue things” have been spoken by the President.
“Trump has now made 1,486 false claims over the first 458 days of his presidency – 4.2 per day in 2018, 3.2 per day overall,” Mr Dale recently reported.
Mr Trump has given the wrong number of electoral college votes won by Hillary Clinton no less than eight times
You might feel that some of these whoppers – like Mr Trump’s statement that Hillary Clinton won 223 electoral college votes rather than actual number of 232 – are just slips of the tongue.
Except Mr Trump has said that EIGHT times since taking office.
He has repeated some so many times his opponents have given up challenging them. The “alternative facts” that won out.
Many Trump supporters say “so what?” to all this. They feel facts are collateral damage in the bigger mission of making America great again.
But it is especially shameful that the politicians who support Mr Trump, or who are terrified of opposing him, have failed to call out the untruths.
Because when we let go of something as basic as the truth, when we are willing to accept fiction instead of fact, just because it suits our politics, our grip on reality, as a society, starts to get very shaky.
President Trump and President Macron appear to be best buddies but is it a real friendship?
But there is still one possible way that there could be a cost for telling porkies.
Which brings us to the tiresome back and forth about whether President Trump will or won’t agree to be interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Mr Trump seems to have a different answer every time he is asked about it.
It is said his lawyers are worried that their free-wheeling client, prone to exaggeration, stretching the truth and thinking he knows best, could land himself in hot water in such an interview.
Say something untrue while under oath and things can get very bad, very quickly.
It is why a Donald Trump, sworn to tell the whole truth and nothing but, would be compelling viewing for everybody else.
“When we let go of something as basic as the truth, when we are willing to accept fiction instead of fact, just because it suits our politics, our grip on reality, as a society, starts to get very shaky. -Greg Milam”
There is a bigger question of where this Trump-ification of facts will lead us.
Will it be just a blip? Will normal service of factual and dull be resumed? Or have the rules of the game changed forever?
If the US President has shown us there are no consequences to playing fast and loose with the truth, why wouldn’t politicians everywhere try it on?
Plenty have already taken to trotting out his “fake news” line when they don’t like questions.
Have any of them paid a price for that?
Like estate agents and journalists, politicians always rank pretty low on those lists of people we trust.
Lots of people think they don’t tell the truth.
https://news.sky.com/story/sky-views-trumps-porkies-pose-a-serious-danger-11351492
