Regular readers know that candidate Donald Trump had difficulty with facts. He earned an astonishing 59 Four-Pinocchio ratings over the course of the campaign.
Now that Trump is president, he continues to make misleading statements, based on incomplete information, inaccurate statistics or flights of fancy. Here’s an accounting of his public statements in the first seven days as president, not counting his error-plagued inauguration speech (which had eight problematic claims). If we wrote a full fact check, we noted the number of Pinocchios the statement received.
Yet even jaded connoisseurs of Oval Office dissembling were astonished over the last week by the torrent of bogus claims that gushed from President Trump during his first days in office.
We’ve never seen anything this bizarre in our lifetimes, where up is down and down is up and everything is in question and nothing is real,” said Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity and the author of “935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America’s Moral Integrity,” a book about presidential deception.
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But for students of Mr. Trump’s long business career, there was much about President Trump’s truth-mangling ways that was familiar: the mystifying false statements about seemingly trivial details, the rewriting of history to airbrush unwanted facts, the branding as liars those who point out his untruths, the deft conversion of demonstrably false claims into a semantic mush of unverifiable “beliefs.”
Mr. Trump’s falsehoods have long been viewed as a reflexive extension of his vanity, or as his method of compensating for deep-seated insecurities. But throughout his business career, Mr. Trump’s most noteworthy deceptions often did double duty, serving not just his ego but also important strategic goals. Mr. Trump’s habitually inflated claims about his wealth, for example, fed his self-proclaimed image of a business genius even as they attracted lucrative licensing deals built around the Trump brand.
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“In a democratic government, there must be truth in order to hold elected officials accountable to their sovereign, which is the people,” Mr. Schmidt said. “All authoritarian societies are built on a foundation of lies and alternative facts, and what is true is what the leader believes, or what is best for the state.”
Mr. Lewis argued that the president’s untruths were a deliberate strategy to position the nation’s leading news organizations as the enemy of his administration. “Fact-checking becomes an act of war by the media,” he said.
Canada will increase its funding to international organizations that provide abortion-related services after U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order blocking American funding for those services.
In an interview with As It Happens guest host Helen Mann on Friday, Minister of International Development Marie-Claude Bibeau said the Liberal government would support a Dutch-led initiative to fund international programs supporting women's reproductive health.
"I think that restricting the access to abortion does not reduce abortion. It only increases the number of unsafe abortions and it endangers the lives of women," Bibeau said. (...)
Trump-style politics incites passions and strong opinions. There are bound to be serious disagreements about Trump and his policies here. It will be a challenge not to harangue each other as that woman was haranguing the guy on the plane, but it'll be a worthwhile challenge.
For you maybe, but I feel no urge to harangue anyone, disagree sure, but when you cross the line on a personal level in political discourse it no longer has anything to do with politics or opinions at all, you are now talking about poor individual character in dealing with others.
I'm about as far left as one can get and I would have applauded her getting removed from the flight too. You simply cannot harass people just because they feel differently than you do. What an asshat
Agreed. However, there have been similar incidents in which Trump supporters have been kicked off planes for harassing fellow passengers. There's intolerance on the right and left. We could play the victim game and post supporting videos all day, but doing so provides no basis for substantive discussion about national politics and policy.
Unfortunately, it's going to be very hard to separate Trump's personality from his administration's decisions. Trump's beliefs and behavior are going to be the basis and driver for national policy and actions. It will be very difficult to analyze and discuss federal policy without taking into account Trump's stubbornness, ignorance about current events and his failure to remove the personal element from his interaction with people opposed or disagreeing with him.
Trump cannot or will not consistently base his opinions or positions on facts or logically change his mind when faced with evidence that contradicts his beliefs. During his 2006 White House Correspondence Dinner speech, Stephen Colbert noted the same behavior in Dubya:
"He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man's beliefs never will."
Trump takes that dangerous tendency even further. He regularly issues statements that contradict his earlier ones without any explanation for the apparent change in thinking. He outright lies. He repeatedly reacts to news and fixates on matters that might not reflect well on his popularity. He threatens those who disagree with him.
Kurtster strongly supports Trump and he has every right to do so. He sees a real chance for change and prosperity during Trump's presidency. He might strongly disagree with my characterization of Trump as a leader. Personally, I think Trump is a modern-day Caligula. Check out the 1976-78 British mini-series "I Claudius" starring Derek Jacobi if you're not familiar with the Roman emperor Caligula (played by John Hurt). I think there's a good chance that the next four years will be very dangerous and ugly.
Trump-style politics incites passions and strong opinions. There are bound to be serious disagreements about Trump and his policies here. It will be a challenge not to harangue each other as that woman was haranguing the guy on the plane, but it'll be a worthwhile challenge.
I'm about as far left as one can get and I would have applauded her getting removed from the flight too. You simply cannot harass people just because they feel differently than you do. What an asshat
fantastic 
