Meme Misattributes Quote On Afghanistan To Trump
A viral meme falsely claims that former President Donald Trump suggested that the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was an orchestrated distraction by Democrats. A spokesperson for Trump has denied he made that remark. A very similar statement, not attributed to the former president, previously went viral on Facebook.
Good Lies And Bad Lies
The problem, of course, is that a great many presidential lies cannot be so easily linked to important purposes.
President Bill Clintons lies about his sexual activities were either simply self-serving or told to preserve his presidency.
Similarly, President Richard Nixons insistence that he knew nothing about the Watergate break-in was most likely a lie. John Dean, Nixons legal counsel, confirmed years later that the president knew about, and approved of, the plan to rob the Democratic National Committee headquarters. This scandal eventually ended Nixons presidency.
In both cases, these presidents faced a significant threat to their presidencies – and chose deception to save not the nation, but their own power.
How Does Donald Trump Lie A Fact Checker’s Final Guide
As the presidential campaign has gathered speed, the Guardian has gathered together the lies the Republican candidate has told. What have we learned?
Donald Trump lies like he tweets: erratically, at all hours, sometimes in malice and sometimes in self-contradiction, and sometimes without any apparent purpose at all. The Guardian has catalogued more than 100 falsehoods made by the Republican nominee over the last 150 days, and sorted them according to theme.
Hillary Clinton has been caught in more than a dozen falsehoods of her own, for instance about her email practices and her past support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But Clinton often makes her falsehoods in dense legalese, making them hard to pin a motive on: many could as easily be errors as lies, careless exaggeration or deliberately misleading claims.
Trump, on the other hand, will say wrong when he hears his own quotes. His own lawyers met him in pairs to counteract his lying, court documents show. He has invented false statistics,fictional videos and sex tapes and a nonexistent man named John Miller to talk about his sex life. Months of fact-checking, however, reveal methods and, whether he means to or not, Trumps guide to success through lying.
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Compiling The Truth: A Resource To Refute Trumps Stolen Election Lies
Former President Trumps lies that he won the 2020 election in a sacred landslide, and that the election was stolen from him, continues to be a cancer in our body politic detrimental to our democracy in both the short-term and the long-term.
Trumps Stop the Steal narrative is being used as a justification to roll back access to voting across the nation. And because this false narrative has been repeated so often by Trump and amplified by national news media friendly to him and by his supporters on social media, significant numbers of Trump voters still believe it.
It has also led to attempts by partisan actors to revisit certified state election results as the Republican majority in the Arizona Senate is doing now after it hired an unqualified firm to do a non-professional “review” of the ballots in Arizona’s largest county Similar partisan efforts are being proposed in other states, paid for by political funds.
“…I find myself absolutely gobsmacked that todays party is shaping itself around the Big Lie that Democrat Joe Biden did not win the 2020 election,” wrote historian Heather Cox-Richardson in the of her blog. “This is a lie. There is no doubt that this is a lie. Trump or his surrogates filed and lost at least 63 lawsuits over the 2020 election, most of which were dropped for lack of evidence.”
The Ongoing Battle Over Trumps Claims Highlights Their Continued Relevance
COMMON QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ABOUT THE 2020 ELECTION RESULTS
Shout At The Messenger
Whenever in doubt, Trump attacks what he calls the dishonest media, accusing reporters of bias, inaccuracy and a failure to show the size of his rallies. He ignores that reporters quote him extensively, call his campaign for comment, interview his supporters, his rivals campaign and independent voters and experts. He often cites news stories about Clinton, and even praised fact-checkers in a presidential debate for catching her in a falsehood.
At every rally, Trump says the cameras refuse to show his audience, even though his campaign forces cameras to stay within a small pen, where they pan to show the crowd as anyone at his rallies or watching online can see. Only one camera at each event stays fixed on Trump: the shared pool camera, whose footage networks share and which stays on Trump so as not to miss his speech.
Last week, NBCs Katy Tur, a target for criticism from the podium, noted that Trump has joked in private with reporters about how he understands how the pool camera works.
This is a shtick that he does to rile up his base, she said, to give them an excuse for polls that might not be in his favor, to give them an excuse to berate someone thats not Donald Trump.
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Inaugural Fund Fails To Publicly Account For $107 Million Haul
Starting with his inauguration, President Trump has courted wealthy special interests while hiding their influence on him and his administration.
President Trumps courtship of big dollar donors and his stewardship of their contributions to his inauguration sent a powerful message about his true priorities.
As president-elect, Trump signaled his administration would be open for business by imposing no limits on individual contributions and a $1 million cap on corporate donations to his inaugural fund. 178 He granted special access to himself and key administration decision-makers to the funds most generous donors. 179
The Trump inaugural fund collected about $107 million, more than twice as much as President Obama raised for his second inaugural in 2013 and about double what Obama raised for his first inaugural in 2009. 180 At least 47 Trump donors gave at least $1 million, and in return got tickets to a leadership luncheon with members of the new presidents Cabinet and congressional leaders those big donors also were invited to dine with Vice President Mike Pence and his wife, Karen, and received tickets to a ladies luncheon to meet the ladies of thefirst families. 181
Neither the president nor the committee have responded to the letter or disclosed the expenditures.
Keeping White House Visitor Logs Secret
The president reversed President Obamas policy of making White House visitor logs public.
Not quite three months after taking office, the Trump administration reversed an Obama-era policy that allowed journalists and the general public to review White House visitor logs. 137 The move came late on Good Friday afternoon after much of the White House press corps had departed for the Easter holiday weekend.
President Trump reversed a transparency policy that had been among the most important of the previous administration. The visitor logs provided the public with valuable information about those who had access to the White House including the names of visitors and the dates and times of their entry and exit.
President Barack Obama first made the visitor logs public by routinely releasing them on the White Houses website. In doing so, President Obama said that making the records public would uphold the American publics right to know whose voices are being heard in the policymaking process. 138 By the time he left the White House, Obama had released nearly 6 million records of visits to the Executive Mansion complex. 139
President Trump, however, would release none unless ordered to do so by a court. This made it clear that Trumps real interest was in obscuring the insular nature of the circle of people influencing him and his staff.
President Trumps break from a new tradition of transparency belies his claims to drain the swamp.
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All The Presidents Lies
Trump told a public lie
Didnt tell a public lie
President Trumps political rise was built on a lie . His lack of truthfulness has also become central to the Russia investigation, with James Comey, the former director of the F.B.I., testifying under oath about Trump’s lies, plain and simple.
There is simply no precedent for an American president to spend so much time telling untruths. Every president has shaded the truth or told occasional whoppers. No other president of either party has behaved as Trump is behaving. He is trying to create an atmosphere in which reality is irrelevant.
We have set a conservative standard here, leaving out many dubious statements . Some people may still take issue with this standard, arguing that the president wasn’t speaking literally. But we believe his long pattern of using untruths to serve his purposes, as a businessman and politician, means that his statements are not simply careless errors.
We are using the word lie deliberately. Not every falsehood is deliberate on Trump’s part. But it would be the height of naïveté to imagine he is merely making honest mistakes. He is lying.
Trumps Obstruction Of Justice
Obstruction doesnt have to be a crime in order to be wrongful.
President Trump obstructed the investigation into Russian intervention in the 2016 presidential election, regardless of whether or not he violated criminal laws. How do we know this? The President told us so.
On January 6, 2017, the nations four top intelligence and investigative agencies issued a joint report concluding with high confidence that Russian operatives had tried to interfere in the 2016 presidential election on the orders of President Putin. 11 The Washington Post had reported a month earlier that it was the assessment of the intelligence community that Russias goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected, according to a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation for U.S. Senators. Thats the consensus view. 12
On May 9, 2017, President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who was heading the Justice Departments Russia investigation. This occurred after Trump had asked Comey to pledge his loyalty to Trump, and after Trump had asked Comey to drop the FBI investigation into Michael Flynn, the presidents first national security advisor. Comey refused both requests. 13
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Veracity Of Statements By Donald Trump
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During his term as President of the United States, Donald Trump made tens of thousands of false or misleading claims one report gave the number as 30,573. Characterized as the propaganda technique firehose of falsehood, commentators and fact-checkers have described it as “unprecedented” in American politics, and the consistency of these falsehoods became a distinctive part of both his business and political identity. Trump is known to have made controversial statements and subsequently denied having done so, and by June 2019, many news organizations had started describing some of his falsehoods as lies, which are false statements that the speaker knows are false. The Washington Post said his frequent repetition of false claims amounts to a campaign based on disinformation. According to writer and journalist Nancy LeTourneau, the debasing of veracity is a tactic.
As part of attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election, Trump and his allies repeatedly and falsely claimed there had been massive election fraud and that Trump had really won the election. Their effort was characterized by some as an implementation of “the big lie“.
