President Trump may be most memorable for his lies

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Nov 2, 2020

This, too, was educational. His Electoral College victory led to divide-and-conquer policies and a strategy of political tribalism that would impress any old-school big-city political boss: Empower your base and they will protect you by intimidating any congressional Republicans who might get in your way — like, for example, the Grand Old Party’s elders who informed Nixon that it was time for him to resign.

Instead, today’s GOP leaders in Congress have become Trump’s enablers, protecting him from impeachment and innumerable other attempts to hold him accountable for his playful relationship with reality.

“Truthful hyperbole” is how Trump describes his frequent exaggerations in his bestselling “The Art of the Deal.”

Let the buyer beware. The skimpiness of his governing abilities appears to be catching up to him this year as he tackles such unexpected crises as the COVID-19 pandemic.

His long-held belief in Norman Vincent Peale’s “The Power of Positive Thinking,” fortified with his “truthful hyperbole,” seems to have distanced him from negative realities. He repeatedly declares that we’re “rounding the corner” on the coronavirus, when plainly we are not. His White House science office even boasted this past week that one of his major achievements has been “ending the COVID-19 pandemic.” We wish.

In that fashion, the president’s avoidance of bad news becomes dangerous misinformation. He has divided Americans along tribal lines and, aided by some overly zealous conservative media, nurtured an alternative reality of conspiracy theories about a nonexistent “deep state.”

Ironically, this latticework of lies actually endangers supporters in his own base who are most likely to believe his cavalier dismissals of the need for masks, school closings and other precautions that can truly “round the corner” on the pandemic.

I’ve had some readers, detecting to their apparent delight that I’m a triggered liberal, sarcastically ask me what I’m going to do if I don’t have this president to kick around anymore. Good question. I’m eager to find out.

========

(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)