According to legend, our first President, George Washington, could not tell a lie. Abraham Lincoln was known as "Honest Abe.” However, it seems that Donald “Dishonest, Con-Man Don" Trump cannot tell the truth. The New York Times compiled a comprehensive list of all the lies Trump has told just since he took office. The link is below (and these do not include his numerous outrageous calumnies during the presidential campaign, like his claim at the Al Smith dinner that “Hillary Clinton hates Catholics!")
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/23/opinion/trumps-lies.html
It’s indicative that when Trump built his eponymous Tower on Fifth Avenue back in the 1980’s, he added 10 non-existent stories to the height just to make it seem bigger. (Talk about symbolism or building envy.) New York City officially records the height of Trump Tower as 58 stories; Trump has claimed it is 68 stories, and reportedly the elevator numbers start at floor 30. Typical, because Trump has spoken fluent bullshit throughout his career. That’s all he is: a total fraud, a flim-flam artist, a professional bullshitter/salesman, who will say anything to anyone at any time. He makes Tricky Dick Nixon look like a paragon of veracity.
But Trump is not a conventional liar who knows he is deliberately prevaricating, like the sleazily obvious, exaggerated character Jon Lovitz created on Saturday Night Live. He lies as reflexive behavior to survive, like a chameleon changes colors, or the apocryphal scorpion that stings the frog transporting him across a pond because “that’s what scorpions do.” Somewhere lost among the neurons of his defective brain, the distinction between fact and false has been replaced by what he wants to be true.
As such, he is a master of the “I'm rubber, you're glue; everything you say sticks to you" school of projection, like when HRC accused him of being Putin’s puppet during a debate. Trump temporarily lost the ability to speak even as semi-coherently as he usually does, spluttering, “Puppet! Puppet! I’m no puppet; you’re the puppet,” which not only made no sense, but was childishly silly. Or when details of Obama’s knowledge of the Russian hacking were made public, Trump contradicted his own previous denials about the attack to blurt in a tweet, “...President Obama did NOTHING… about Russian meddling… He didn’t ‘choke,’ he colluded or obstructed...,” which are the exact same charges that have been leveled against Trump.
Some of Trump’s steadfast supporters cling to their guns, religion, and stupidity to still believe everything he says. Others know he is lying, but cynically don’t care. Worst of all are the House and Senate republicans, who don’t care about the country or how many people are hurt; they see Trump as a useful fool to advance their anti-healthcare, anti-environment, pro-tax cuts for the rich agenda. They are the much bigger threat to America, who were there before Trump and may be there after him. But reality is like gravity; it can only be defied for so long. Lincoln said, “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time." Trump is putting that maxim to the test. If Trump does enough damage in a short enough time, it may sweep the malignant republicans out of office with him, and that is the only long term solution to the problem. Trump said during the campaign that we can't have a country without deporting all illegal immigrants. Like virtually everything he utters, that isn't so. But what we really can't have is a country without largely, mutually agreed upon reality and facts, not “alternative” ones. As Lincoln also said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” whether the division was over slavery in his time, or what constitutes truth today.