Ludicrous, Quintessential Trump Lies

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1. Jack Holmes is Associate Editor for News & Politics at Esquire.com, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P. Pierce. He also does a dash of sports and some feature writing. His work has appeared in New York magazine and The Daily Beast.

The following are excerpts from Jack Holmes' June 15, 2018 article headlined "This Is the Quintessential Trump Lie" with subheading "Shameless, easily verifiable, and rooted in the notion that imaginary people are telling him things".

(Begin excerpts)
This is truly a vintage Trumpian lie. As many have pointed out already, assuming the parents of a Korean War veteran were 18 when they were born, those parents would be a minimum of 101 years old today. More likely, they'd be at least 110. The idea that multiple 110-year-old people came up to Donald Trump on the campaign trail to ask him to bring home the remains of their son killed on North Korean soil 63 years prior is just absurd. It's a stirring story, a noble enough sentiment, and, in this case, completely nuts. The president is just saying things again.

In that way, this is a quintessential Trumpian lie: totally shameless, easily verifiable as false, and rooted in the notion that "many people"—who are never defined further, and who you'll never be able to find—are telling the president something that he just happens to agree with himself. How many times in this troubled period in our nation's history have we heard how "many people are saying" something about Donald Trump?

The possibly more worrying thing here is that there was not all that much to immediately gain from the lie, while the related issue was already sort of a victory for the president. It points to the lying being a truly pathological issue, an instinctive mode of operation for a dangerously impulsive man. It's not breaking any new ground to say it, but this is a problematic attribute for the leader of the world's most powerful country. (End excerpts)

Source: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a ... rents-lie/