How do you know when Donald Trump is lying?
The New York Times reports that Donald Trump’s orders directing, then retracting, the separation of children from their immigrant parents has created such chaos on the border that officials who execute those whims are at a loss. The immediate result was a heated White House confrontation that settled nothing. Meanwhile, thousands of children dispersed nationwide are proving hard to trace.
This is not Trump’s first trashing of political and constitutional regularity, but it is by all odds the most embarrassing — a spectacle condemned the world over. And as usual, he is trying to lie his way out of blame and trying to shift responsibility to the Democrats.
He doesn’t seem to understand that the creation of such public illusion (“fake news,” as he likes to call it) is a double-edged weapon. The separation of unprocessed families (the “huddled masses, yearning to be free” advertised by Emma Lazarus’ verse on the Statue of Liberty, which presumably beckons those masses to seek a redemptive U.S. homeland), flooded the world-wide sound and picture television machine. The imagery of children crying for their missing mothers, or sleeping on floors in detention cages, jolted a nation previously lulled and gulled by Trump’s stunts. Even some congressional Republicans!
If you missed the White House excuse, this is the result of a “zero tolerance” policy on our southern borders. Stripped of bureaucratic sanitizing and gobbledygook, it means that all would-be immigrants who arrive at those borders must be treated alike, whether they are fleeing political persecution in, say, El Salvador, or the usual Mexicans seeking better jobs — whose numbers, Trump’s lies notwithstanding, were shrinking well before he began fantasizing about a wall to block imaginary murderers and rapists. Enforcement officials, denied all discretion, lack facilities to process them. This, apparently, was the gist of the 90-minute confrontation at the White House on Friday.
Trump has forgotten, if he ever knew, the poet Robert Frost’s line, “something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” in a poem that ends with the wise sentiment that those who build walls should know whom they’re walling in and walling out. He has also forgotten how odious the world found the Berlin wall, hastily thrown up by Nikita Khrushchev in 1961 to imprison East Berlin in a decaying communist system. Trump’s wall and Khrushchev’s aren’t identical, but they inflict the same black eye on their creators. And if Trump knew his ante-bellum U.S. history he would know that the breakup of slave families, and the “selling South” of parents and children was among the cruelest facts of the slavery system. Again, not identical, but reminiscent.
Donald Trump is indeed a “genius” — a genius at making pointless trouble by casually translating personal whims and partisan designs into damaging mischief. In the space of some 18 months, he has alienated our good neighbors, Canada (whose diplomats risked their lives in 1979 protecting American colleagues from envenomed Islamist revolutionaries), and NATO and Asian allies, even as he embraces petty tyrants and bullies from Pyongyang to Ryad to Moscow. He has snarled American farmers in a “trade war” with capricious tariffs.
And he has degraded truth and candor in public discourse. It is depressing to see a puffed-up petty figure soil and disgrace the seat hallowed by Washington, Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who solved crises, even some that threaten national existence. Trump, by contrast, creates them. But the most dangerous of his follies is hour by hour, minute by minute, day by day, week by week falsification and misrepresentation of serious issues, and degrading the press, our only real source of alternative truths, as “enemies of the people.”
This brazen counterfeiting of truth suggests a pertinent variation on an old and bad joke:
Q: How do you know when Donald Trump is lying?
A: When he moves his lips.
This story was originally published June 25, 2018 at 9:31 AM with the headline "How do you know when Donald Trump is lying?."