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'Fake News?' Look Who's Talking

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

Is it too early to declare outright that our current American president is a serial liar?

I think we have waited long enough. It turns out that President Donald Trump's bogus challenge to President Barack Obama's birth certificate was only the beginning of the former reality TV star's whoppers.

For weeks, political journalists and their editors have debated whether it is proper to use the L-word to describe a peculiar habit of President Donald Trump. He says things that are demonstrably false and yet insists they are true -- and threatens to hurl insults at you if you insist on seeing something like evidence.

"Falsehood," "misstatement" or "untruth" doesn't cut it when "bogus," "baseless" or my old favorite "bulljive" hit closer to the point.

The staid, reserved New York Times raised many eyebrows by using the L-word in a front-page headline, no less, on Jan. 23 to say Trump repeated "an election lie" during a meeting with Congressional leaders, no less, at the White House.

The lie was Trump's often repeated allegation that he would have won the popular vote in November but for "millions of people who voted illegally."

 

Jaw meet floor. That whopper must have been breathtaking for congressional leaders from both parties, whether they said it out loud or not.

Yet, when questioned about it, the best Trump and his team have come up with is the thousands of dead people who are still on the rolls or the many live people who are improperly registered in more than one state because they moved.

But alas, there's no evidence that anyone voted in their names. Trump would rather undermine the credibility of our democracy than admit he's grandstanding again.

Trump is only getting bolder. After recent CNN and Gallup polls said he had the lowest approval ratings of any new president in the history of polling -- and that more than half disapproved of his controversial travel order as an attempt to keep Muslims out of the country -- Trump tweeted on Monday that "Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election. Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting."

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(c) 2017 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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