Jeff Robbins

License To Lie: In Trump’s America, You Just Say Anything

“I cannot tell a lie,” young George Washington supposedly told his father when asked if he’d cut down a cherry tree. That there was no tree and George never said those words hasn’t impeded the myth that holds otherwise, popularized by one of Washington’s early biographers. Ever since, Americans have opted to think that their first president was a model of probity.

The comforting notion that our presidents were honest has been an important part of our national self-image. The fact that Abraham Lincoln had Machiavellian talents — and needed them — hasn’t interfered with our preferred view of him as Honest Abe.

To be sure, we’ve had big disappointments in the honesty department. Richard Nixon protesting “I am not a crook” while being one and Bill Clinton declaring “I never had sex with that woman” when he certainly had come to mind.

But over the last half century, whatever controversies there’ve been over former Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bushes 1 and 2 and Obama, we’ve at least settled into an expectation that our presidents were basically aboveboard.

Until, that is, President Donald Trump came along and proved that Americans could embrace a president who lies morning, noon and night — on social media, in interviews, in the White House, on the tarmac, on Air Force One, long form, short form, whatever the season, whatever the reason. The Washington Post tabulated 30,573 presidential falsehoods during Trump’s first term alone. All of that, plus a raft of fraud convictions, an indictment for defrauding the United States, another one for stealing national secrets and a civil judgment that he’d defrauded financial institutions, didn’t trouble Americans sufficiently to reject his 2024 bid to reclaim the White House.

The obvious message is that Americans no longer mind terribly having their leaders lie. Many Americans even appear to admire the skill, even the brazenness, of the president’s lying. It’s only to be expected, therefore, that after watching an indefatigable liar lie without consequences for ten years, the lesson for American politicians is: Just say anything, because there’s a perfectly fine chance that voters will buy it. The days when politicians risked their careers by reciting obvious BS are over.

It is “Say Anything Time” in America. Terrified of Trump, owned by him lock, stock and barrel, the GOP has enabled the lying obsequiously and recklessly, any claim to care about integrity placed in what looks like an irrevocable blind trust.

Perhaps inevitably, the Trump playbook — flagrant, even arrogant dissembling — has seeped into the Democratic Party’s bloodstream. How could it be otherwise when it has worked so well for Trump?

In Maine, Democratic darling Graham Platner, resoundingly victorious in Maine’s Senate primary, responded to the disclosures that he had sported a Nazi tattoo for many years by denying — of course — that he knew a Nazi tattoo was a Nazi tattoo. His former campaign director and a former girlfriend attested to the fact that this was not only prima facie preposterous but balderdash. The ex-girlfriends themselves likewise debunked his denials that he had physically assaulted them. When the tsunami of damaging revelations forced him to withdraw, Platner released a video in which, in a triumph of integrity, he blamed his demise on everyone but himself.

In Michigan, Democratic Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed angrily denies that he ever called for the defunding of police. But on June 23, 2020, he said: “I believe that we do need to defund the police insofar as defunding the police is disinvesting in the means of incarcerating someone or killing them on the street.” Pressed on CNN to explain the “discrepancy”, el-Sayed denounced the journalist for paying so much attention to the fact that he had expressly endorsed defunding the police by using the actual word “defund.”

It’s a pattern with him. Asked why he’s been refusing to release his tax returns until after the Michigan primary was over, el-Sayed said that because his family had assets and received income from undisclosed foreign sources in undisclosed foreign countries, making those disclosures before the primary was too much of “a thing.”

“A thing.”

Because hitting the “send” key on a computer is “a thing.”

But, hey. In the Time of Trump, the takeaway is to just say anything and bull your way through.

In more ways than one.

Jeff Robbins

Former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.