In my first post on Trump as a “brand,” I discussed how Donald Trump’s campaign and
persona have involved 4 D’s: deadbeat, deceiver, demagogue, and danger. My second post related to this attempted
to comprehensively cover his career as a deadbeat and what that might portend
for his leadership of our economy. With precious little time left in this
election, I thought I would devote this
post entirely, in detail, to his career as a deceiver.
This year, the GOP nominated a candidate who, by
virtue of intellect, training and temperament, is completely unqualified for
the Presidency. One has to ask how this came to pass. In no small part, the
answer lies in the nominee’s capacity to hoodwink large portions of the public
about his background and beliefs.
Some trace the source of Trump’s initial popularity
with GOP primary voters to his lack of caution or a filter—his “lack of
political correctness,” they’ll say. That is an entirely too generous an
assessment of his personality, however.
In Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, Cary Grant’s ad man noted that in his
profession, there were no lies, only “expedient exaggeration.” Trump took this
notion—and, typically, galloped away with it—in The Art of the Deal:
“The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I
play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but
they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole
never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest
and the most spectacular.
“I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form
of exaggeration -- and a very effective form of promotion,” he added.
“Truthful hyperbole” makes rather rich Trump’s claim
that Hillary Clinton “lies all the time.” I write this with no love lost for
either her or her priapic husband. (For proof, see this prior of mine, “The Clinton Playbook: Bipartisan Survival in the Sex-Scandal Age.”)
But Trump’s falsehoods have been so broad and brazen that Politifact had to put them in a whole category of its own. It couldn’t award him a single “Lie of the
Year,” so it had to assign a whole group to it.
In a remarkable six-page editorial urging America to
“Bury Trump in a Landslide,” The New
York Daily News was not engaging in
the slightest hyperbole when it referred to him as “the most extraordinary, if
not pathological, liar ever to seek the Presidency.”
Trump's Own "Birther" Problem
Among his lies that proved central to his unlikely
candidacy for the Oval Office were his dark insinuations about Barack Obama. He
not only stage-managed “birtherism’s” movement from the political margins to a
constant issue dogging the President, but also hinted that Obama might not be
releasing his Columbia University transcript because it would prove that he had
been admitted to the school on the basis of affirmative action.
But Trump has an “origins” story far darker—marked
by persistent obfuscation, the influence exerted by the very rich, and
lying—than the President he so relentlessly criticized. If Barack Obama Sr.
figures hugely in the paranoid nightmare of members of the Alt-Right, then Fred
Trump plays an even more central role in the murky tale of his son’s
beginnings.
In a section of his 1987 bestseller, The Art of the Deal, detailing his
family history, Trump observed that his grandfather “came from Sweden as a
child.” The only problem is that the real-estate mogul is no more Swedish than
I am. (For the record, I’m of Irish descent on both sides of my family.)
For the record, Friedrich Trump — Donald’s
grandfather —came not from Sweden, but from Kallstadt, a small town near the
German border with France. After emigrating to the U.S. at the turn of the
century, he tried to go home, but the authorities’ reminder of his
military-service obligation sent him back to the U.S. again, this time for
good.
More than 30 years later, Friedrich’s son Fred—now
selling homes, with a large base consisting of returning WWII veterans—began to
peddle the story that he was the son of a Swedish immigrant. What would have
led him to make that claim?
Some have implied that he was trying not to excite
zenophobes who blamed American involvement in two world wars on German
aggression. But there may well have been more to it than that.
A June 1, 1927 article in The New York Times reported that Fred Trump had been among
individuals arrested after a "near-riot" involving 100 policemen and
1,000 Klansmen in Jamaica, Queens, at a "Memorial parade." This was
not a case of mistaken identity, as the address listed was one not only linked
to Fred (21 at the time) on Census records but where he lived for much of his
adult life.
The article is ambiguous about the extent of Fred’s
involvement, if any; it notes that Fred had been discharged, so it is possible
that he was an innocent bystander. But by the late 1940s, he would not have
been eager for the war vets (many Jewish) he was trying to attract to his
housing connect him to a racist, anti-Semitic organization. A claimed Swedish
ancestry, on the other hand, would have thrown peopled off the scent. Just to
make sure it stayed that way, Fred backed Israeli bonds, according to a Michael Daly article earlier this year in The Daily Beast.
The family inclination for fabulous tales, then,
passed from Friedrich to Fred to Donald. The grandson’s mounted as high as his
Manhattan real estate.
'First in His Class'? Really?
Although Trump’s promotion of the birther lie about
Obama has gotten more attention, the tycoon’s hit-and-run insinuations about
the President’s attendance at Columbia University may be more hypocritical.
Even before he implied that affirmative action might have been behind Obama’s
successful transfer from Occidental College to Columbia, he hinted, even more
outrageously, that the President might not have attended at all, because none
of Obama’s classmates could even remember him from those years!
That line of attack is typical of Trump’s method:
first try one line of attack, then, if that doesn’t fly, try another. Even if
that second one doesn’t work, it would be like a plate of food hurled against
the wall: even if it bounced off, it would leave a mess afterward. His hints
about Obama’s collegiate career had its intended effect on that portion of the
Republican base who could never bring themselves to believe that an
African-American had achieved enough—or even possessed enough intelligence for—to
attend not just one, but two (Columbia, Harvard Law School) Ivy League
institutions.
Trump’s own path through academe poses a good deal
more questions than Obama’s, though. He, too, transferred to an Ivy League
school—in this case, from Fordham University to the Wharton School of Business
at the University of Pennsylvania. For anyone who claims he at least was not
admitted to this selective institution because of affirmative action, they
might want to keep in mind that it likely came through an even surer means:
family influence.
I don’t mean simply Fred Trump—whose wealth alone,
to be sure, might have smoothed the path for Donald. No, I’m talking about Fred
Jr., Donald’s brother, who was
friendly with an admissions officer at the school, according to Trump
biographer Gwenda Blair.
What was he like once he got into the school?
In 1973, he told a reporter from The New York Times that he had graduated
first in his class at Wharton. (It would not be the only lie he would tell
journalists that year: he also decried the discrimination lawsuit against his
father then as “ridiculous.”)
There was only one problem with this, and knowing
Trump, you’ve probably guessed it already: the likelihood that it was true was
close to zero. An article in The Daily
Pennsylvanian from 1968 did not list him among 56 people who made the
Dean's List at Wharton in 1967-68, nor did any of his classmates recall him
being valedictorian or even especially academically accomplished.
These last few anecdotes collectively tell a story: By the time Trump was making his way into
the business world, he was already lying. These were not lies to protect himself or
someone he loved because of a mistake, but lies to puff himself up, to see his
name in the paper again and again. What he learned was that it would take such
a long time for someone to catch up with the lie that by that time he’d be in
another situation requiring a different, larger fraud.
The Alternate-Reality Candidate: A Partial Checklist
We should have known that someday, Trump would
become a reality-show star. It’s not only because such shows are fake and
manipulative, but because they involve the creation of an alternate reality—most
notably, the construction of a persona, dependent on an audience without memory
of his ceaseless chameleon changes.
And so, in this campaign, we have a Republican
nominee for President who:
*Nearly 14 years ago, wisecracked that Paula Jones’
problem was that she didn’t run away fast enough from Bill Clinton—but who,
before his second debate with Hillary, held a press conference featuring Jones
and other women who had accused the former President of improprieties;
*A decade ago, knowing all the accusations against
Bill Clinton, nevertheless invited him and his wife to his third wedding—but
who now hits out at them for mistreating women;
*Claims that no man respects women more than he
does—but was forced to apologize after being caught on tape bragging about
grabbing women’s private parts;
*Claimed a couple of times, in 2015 and 2016, that
he didn’t “know anything” about David Duke after the Ku Klux Klaner endorsed
him—even though he had previously denounced him twice, a decade apart;
* Says that the “real” current unemployment rate
could be as high as 42%, conveniently forgetting the fact that unemployment in
the Great Depression—generally regarded as the worst economic crisis in
American history—peaked at only 25% in 1933;
*Said in 2003 that he would probably support the
American invasion of Iraq (“Yeah, I guess so”), only to deny doing so
today—even though he is shown on videotape doing so;
*Said that Clinton’s approach to borders meant that
she “wants to let people just pour in; you could have 650 million people pour
in and we do nothing about it,” ignoring the inconvenient facts that, as
Associated Press reporters Calvin Woodward and Jim Drinkard note, “every other
country in the Americas, from Mexico south to Chile’s southern tip, and a chunk
of Canada would have to empty its entire population into the U.S.”;
*Until six years ago, he supported various
gun-control measures, only to go all-in with the National Rifle Association
now;
* Tweeted during the primaries that rival Ted Cruz’s
father may have been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy;
* Claimed falsely that the 9/11 terrorists' friends,
family, girlfriends in the United States "were sent back for the most part
to Saudi Arabia. They knew what was going on. They went home, and they wanted
to watch their boyfriends on television";
*Impersonated a publicist in order to brag about
himself in the early 1990s, only to deny doing so during the primaries (and, of
course, lashed out at the Today show
for bringing it up)—even though he admitted as much to People Magazine two decades ago.
A Habit of Hiding the Truth
Part and parcel of Trump’s deceit has been not
simply his continuous, unashamed lying, but his penchant for concealing the
truth. That has meant destruction of documents required in court cases (on a
scale that dwarfs Hillary Clinton’s problems with e-mail); suing opponents of
his projects; threatening libel suits against media outlets; and inciting
crowds at rallies and his Twitter followers against individual reporters (after
the candidate lashed out at her, NBC reporter Katy Tur required Secret Service
protection to shield her against Trump supporters).
In fact, Trump has shown far greater solicitude
toward the ambiguous Second Amendment than he has toward the very clear First
Amendment. While he has gone all-in with the National Rifle Association, his
proposal for banning Muslims amounts to a religious test for entering the
country; his vow to make it easier to sue for libel amounts to a shield against
inquiries into his own activities; and his threat to pursue anti-trust
litigation against Washington Post
owner Jeff Bezos represents blatant vindictiveness against a newspaper that has
published some of the reports most damaging to his candidacy (e.g., David
Fahrenthold’s stories about Trump not donating all the money he’d claimed to
have made to charities, and about the groping tape).
I could go on and on like this. The beauty of such a
list is that it’s interactive: Trump has generated so many falsehoods, on a
daily basis, that readers can readily add to this compilation.
Sometimes, in the course of this long campaign, I
have despaired about writing this series on Trump in what has been called a
“post-factual” environment. Too many people (and that includes those of the
left as well as the right) remain so wedded to their ideology that they are
impervious to any challenge to it.
But to accept this state of affairs is to throw up
one’s hands about the possibility of the effective mass persuasion needed for
democracy. Moreover, it means abandoning the need for accountability toward all
who seek public office. That way lies a danger almost as significant as the
Trump candidacy itself with its war on truth.
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