Trump's lie-industrial complex

Trump’s lie-industrial complex
Real time fact-checking has gotten under Trump's skin this time around

By Lucian K. Truscott IV
Columnist
Published October 15, 2024 9:15AM (EDT)


(Salon) Lying and denial go hand in hand. Every time a lie is told, a denial must be concocted to protect the lie by denying that it is a lie. What Donald Trump realized decades ago when he was pursuing fame in the New York tabloids is that his denials did not need facts or evidence to back them up. Protecting his lies needed repetition, first of the lie, then of the denial, then of attacks on his accusers.

It’s been written that Trump learned this from his mentor, Roy Cohn, who was a criminal attorney in both senses of the words. But Trump didn’t need to learn how to lie and protect his lies from Roy Cohn. His own father taught him a master class in lying with his racist practice of either refusing to rent apartments to Black people or “steering” them into substandard dwellings and charging them more rent than he charged White people.

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Trump’s dealings with the Department of Justice in the 1970s and 1980s were the beginnings of what we might call Trump’s lie-industrial complex. You tell lie after lie, issue denial after denial, launch attack after attack, all the while claiming that you are the one who is being discriminated against.

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Donald Trump isn’t content to just spew lies and more lies, overwhelming any attempts to keep up with him. Now Trump demands an end to fact-checking by journalists from every kind of news organization. After first scheduling the interview with the CBS program “60 Minutes” that presidential candidates have traditionally done every election year in October, Trump canceled the interview because the network refused to commit to not fact-checking what he said. Trump, his running mate JD Vance and any Republican who could find a microphone complained that the presidential debate between Trump and Kamala Harris was “three against one” because the debate moderators had corrected the former president when he claimed that Haitian immigrants were eating the pets of neighbors in Springfield, Ohio. Debate moderator David Muir said that ABC News had been told by Springfield’s city manager that “there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.” ..............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/10/15/trumps-lie-industrial-complex/