Trump says his base will believe anything he tells them and I'm sure he's right-- but the other 65% of the country knows he's a liar and don't believe anything he says. Trump's reflexive lying didn't especially work than well for him in business-- and, as a strategy, it's working even worse in the Oval Office.
From Greg Sargent's new book, An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics, he points out, helpfully (at least for posterity) that Señor T "isn’t trying to persuade anyone to believe his lies as much as he’s trying to render factual reality irrelevant-- thus reducing the pursuit of agreement on it to just another part of the media circus in which he thrives… There is a reason Trump regularly tells lies that are very easy to debunk: The whole point of them is to assert the power to say what the truth is, even when-- or especially when-- easily verifiable facts, ones that are right in front of our noses, dictate the contrary. The brazenness and shamelessness of his lying is not just a by-product of an effort to mislead voters that Trump is merely taking to new levels. Rather, the brazenness and shamelessness of the lying is central to his broader project of declaring for himself the power to say what reality is."
One of the Washington Post's Trumpanzee fact checkers, Glenn Kessler, reported this morning that his paper has a new category of compulsive lies: the bottomless Pinocchio. "Trump’s willingness to constantly repeat false claims," he wrote, "has posed a unique challenge to fact-checkers. Most politicians quickly drop a Four-Pinocchio claim, either out of a duty to be accurate or concern that spreading false information could be politically damaging. Not Trump. The president keeps going long after the facts are clear, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to replace the truth with his own, far more favorable, version of it. He is not merely making gaffes or misstating things, he is purposely injecting false information into the national conversation. To accurately reflect this phenomenon, the Washington Post Fact Checker is introducing a new category-- the Bottomless Pinocchio. That dubious distinction will be awarded to politicians who repeat a false claim so many times that they are, in effect, engaging in campaigns of disinformation."
The bar for the Bottomless Pinocchio is high: The claims must have received three or four Pinocchios from The Fact Checker, and they must have been repeated at least 20 times. Twenty is a sufficiently robust number that there can be no question the politician is aware that his or her facts are wrong. The list of Bottomless Pinocchios will be maintained on its own landing page.
The Fact Checker has not identified statements from any other current elected official who meets the standard other than Trump. In fact, 14 statements made by the president immediately qualify for the list.
The president’s most-repeated falsehoods fall into a handful of broad categories-- claiming credit for promises he has not fulfilled; false assertions that provide a rationale for his agenda; and political weaponry against perceived enemies such as Democrats or special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
Some of Trump’s regular deceptions date from the start of his administration, such as his claim that the United States has spent $7 trillion in the Middle East (36 times) or that the United States pays for most of the cost of NATO (87 times). These were both statements that he made repeatedly when he campaigned for president and continues to make, despite having access to official budget data.
Another campaign claim that has carried into his presidency is the assertion that Democrats colluded with Russia during the election (48 times). This is obviously false, as the Democrats were the target of hacking by Russian entities, according to U.S. intelligence agencies. (The assertion, also spread widely by Trump allies in the conservative media, largely rests on the fact that the firm hired by Democrats to examine Trump’s Russia ties was also working to defend a Russian company in U.S. court.)
On 30 separate occasions, Trump has also falsely accused special counsel Mueller of having conflicts of interest and the staff led by the longtime Republican of being “angry Democrats.”
A good example of how objective reality does not appear to matter to the president is how he has framed his tax cut. When the administration’s tax plan was still in the planning stages, Trump spoke to the Independent Community Bankers Association on May 1, 2017, and made this claim, to applause: “We’re proposing one of the largest tax cuts in history, even larger than that of President Ronald Reagan. Our tax cut is bigger.”
He reinforced that statement later that day, with similar wording, in an interview with Bloomberg News.
From the start, it was a falsehood, as Reagan’s 1981 tax cut amounted to 2.9 percent of the overall U.S. economy-- and nothing under consideration by Trump came close to that level. Trump’s tax cut was eventually crafted to be just under 1 percent of the economy, making it the eighth-largest tax cut in the past century.
Yet Trump has been undeterred by pesky fact checks showing he is wrong. He kept making the claim-- 123 times before the midterm elections-- and still says it. “We got the biggest tax cuts in history,” he told Chris Wallace of Fox News in his Nov. 18 interview.
Similarly, in June, the president hit upon a new label for the U.S. economy: It was the greatest, the best or the strongest in U.S. history. He liked the phrasing so much that he repeated a version of it every 1.5 days until the midterm elections, for a total of 99 times. The president can certainly brag about the state of the economy, but he runs into trouble when he repeatedly makes a play for the history books. By just about any important measure, the economy today is not doing as well as it did under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson and Bill Clinton-- not to mention Ulysses S. Grant.
Trump has 40 times asserted that a wall was needed to stem the flow of drugs across the border-- a claim that is contradicted the by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which says most illicit drugs come through legal points of entry. Traffickers conceal the drugs in hidden compartments within passenger cars or hide them alongside other legal cargo in tractor trailers and drive the illicit substances right into the United States. Meanwhile, Fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid, can be easily ordered online, even directly from China.
Some of Trump’s most repeated claims verge on the edge of fantasy. Thirty-seven times, he has asserted that U.S. Steel has announced that it is building new plants in response to his decision to impose steel tariffs. Depending on his mood, the number has ranged from six to nine plants, suggesting a bounty of jobs. But U.S. Steel made no such announcement. It merely stated that it would restart two blast furnaces at the company’s Granite City Works integrated plant in Illinois, creating 800 jobs. The company in August also said it would upgrade a plant in Gary, Ind., but without creating any new jobs.
Similarly, Trump has repeatedly inflated the gains from his 2017 trip to Saudi Arabia, upping the amount from $350 billion to $450 billion when he came under fire for defending the crown prince believed to have ordered the killing of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi.
Separately, he also inflates the jobs said to be created, at one point offering a fanciful figure of 1 million. The Fact Checker obtained detailed spreadsheets of both the military and commercial agreements that showed a total of $267 billion in agreements; we determined that many were simply aspirational. Many of the purported investments are in Saudi Arabia, indicating few jobs would be created for Americans.
Other claims on the list include:
• that the administration has removed thousands and thousands of MS-13 members from the streets, either through deportation or prison. (The group is estimated to have only about 10,000 members).
• that he came just one vote short of repealing Obamacare. (Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) blocked a trimmed-down version, but the full plan was soundly defeated, and there was little consensus on a compromise version.)
• that the United States has “lost” billions of dollars on trade deficits. No economist would agree with that statement, but Trump has said some version of it 131 times.
• that the United States has the worst immigration laws in terms of keeping immigrants out. That’s simply not true. In fact, the United States has among the world’s most restrictive immigration laws.
One other Four-Pinocchio claim by Trump may soon make the list. Fifteen times, the president has claimed to audiences that the Uzbekistan-born man who in 2017 allegedly killed eight people with a pickup truck in New York brought in two dozen relatives to the United States through so-called “chain migration.” But Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov is not even a U.S. citizen, so the actual number is zero.
The only problem with this kind of fact checking, is that it works best for crazy tweets and wild statements but doesn't play as well into long and complicated schemes, like the one Ezra Klein recounted this morning for Vox readers about Paul Ryan's long con. "Ryan's legacy," he wrote, "can be summed up in just one number: $343 billion. That’s the increase between the deficit for fiscal year 2015 and fiscal year 2018-- that is, the difference between the fiscal year before Ryan became speaker of the House and the fiscal year in which he retired. If the economy had fallen into recession between 2015 and 2018, Ryan’s record would be understandable. But it didn’t. In fact, growth quickened and the labor market tightened-- which means deficits should’ve fallen. Indeed, that’s exactly what happened in each of the five years preceding Ryan’s speakership; from 2011 to 2015, annual deficits fell each year."
Even more important, if the spending had been used to improve America-- says by funding free state universities or funding Medicare-For-All, two reasonable examples-- instead of for wasteful tax cuts for billionaires, it would be something positive, rather than something negative enough to mar Ryan's place in history forever.
As he prepares to leave office, Ryan says that debt reduction is one of those things “I wish we could have gotten done.” Ryan, the man with the single most power over the federal budget in recent years, sounds like a bystander, as if he watched laws happen rather than made them happen.
To understand the irony and duplicity of that statement, you need to understand Ryan’s career. After the profligacy of the George W. Bush years and the rise of the Tea Party, Ryan rocketed to the top ranks of his party by warning that mounting deficits under President Obama threatened the “most predictable economic crisis we have ever had in this country.” Absent the fiscal responsibility that would accompany Republican rule, we were facing nothing less than “the end of the American dream.”
Ryan’s reputation was built on the back of his budgets: draconian documents that gutted social spending, privatized Medicare, and showed the Republican Party had embraced the kinds of hard fiscal choices that Bush had sloughed off. And Ryan presented himself as the wonkish apostle of this new GOP, rolling up his sleeves and running through the charts, graphs, and tables that made his case.
“I admit that in recent years Republicans abandoned these principles,” Ryan wrote in the book Young Guns, the 2010 GOP manifesto he co-authored with Reps. Kevin McCarthy and Eric Cantor. “We lost the true path and suffered electoral defeats. But we have not returned from this experience empty handed.”
What Republicans had returned with, according to Ryan, was a willingness to make hard choices. “It’s time politicians in Washington stopped patronizing the American people as if they were children,” he wrote. “It’s time we stop deferring tough decisions and promising fiscal fantasies.”
For this, Ryan was feted in Washington society; the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget gave him a “Fiscy” award for budget bravery; he was a member of the Simpson-Bowles commission (which he ultimately voted against); he became Mitt Romney’s vice presidential candidate. His reputation was so towering that when John Boehner stepped down as speaker, he told Ryan, “You’ve got to do this job.”
...[T]o critics like the New York Times’ Paul Krugman, Ryan was an obvious con man weaponizing the deficit to hamstring Obama’s presidency, weaken the recovery, and snooker Beltway centrists eager to champion a reasonable-seeming Republican. Ryan, after all, had voted for Bush’s deficits-- he was a yes on the tax cuts, on the wars, on Medicare Part D. He proposed a Social Security privatization scheme so pricey that even the Bush administration dismissed it as “irresponsible.”
And his budgets, for all the hard choices, didn’t actually add up. They included massive tax cuts with underestimated costs and unspecified financing-- which is what led Krugman to call him a charlatan back in 2010. Ryan waved this away as nitpicking. ”If needed,” his office said, “adjustments can be easily made to the specified rates to hit the revenue targets.” But his critics predicted he would lose his appetite for hard choices the moment his party returned to power. He hadn’t changed; he had merely rebranded.
The numbers proved them right. Ryan was elected speaker of the House on October 29, 2015. Over the next three years, annual deficits increased by almost 80 percent. The added debt is Ryan’s legacy, not his circumstance. It is entirely attributable to policy choices he made.
...Three bills in particular stand out in assessing Ryan’s record.
The first is the 2017 tax cut Ryan passed but didn’t pay for. His defenders note that early drafts of the tax cut bill included a border adjustment tax that would’ve made the package revenue-neutral, fulfilling Ryan’s promises. But that policy fell out of the legislation early on, and rather than replace it, Ryan pushed a plan that added $1.5 trillion to the national debt over 10 years, and used accounting gimmicks to hide vastly larger increases tucked into the legislation’s long-term design. Now House Republicans, still under Ryan’s leadership, are agitating to make the tax cuts permanent, with a 20-year cost estimated at $4 trillion.
This is particularly galling given that Ryan’s initial star turn in Republican politics came through a misleading presentation accusing the Obama administration of using gimmickry to hide Obamacare’s true cost. (In reality, Obamacare was paid for and its costs have been even lower than promised.)
The second is the spending Ryan passed but didn’t pay for. Years of fiscal irresponsibility have sometimes permitted Republicans to be graded on a curve, where tax cuts can be charged to the national credit card and spending cuts are the true measure of policy steel. But even on this diminished measure, Ryan’s record betrayed his promises.
In March, Ryan pushed a $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill through the House, which included almost $300 billion in spending increases. New spending, it turned out, only had to be paid for so long as it was a Democratic president proposing or signing it.
“When you have power and need to make choices, those choices do reveal something about you,” says Yuval Levin, editor of the conservative policy journal National Affairs. “I think what they reveal is where the least common denominator is in the Republican Party. I think there’s no question that what Republicans do when we get power is supply-side tax cuts. That’s the wall I and others have been banging our heads into for years now.”
The third is the expansion of the earned income tax credit Ryan proposed but never even tried to pass. After the 2010 election, he went on a much-vaunted tour of American poverty, racking up positive press for expanding the boundaries of the possible under conservatism, and arguing for an enlarged EITC that would help childless adults.
The Obama administration quickly spied a possible compromise with Ryan, and sought to capitalize on it. But Ryan proved more interested in the praise than the policy.
“When we tried to get it into a negotiation, he refused,” says Jason Furman, who served as Obama’s chief economist. “It wasn’t in his tax plan. In $1.5 trillion in tax cuts, he somehow couldn’t find space for this $60 billion item. It’s just amazing.”
Ryan’s defenders portray him as a principled legislator trapped by the coalition he managed.
“Donald Trump was president of the United States, and that circumscribed Paul Ryan’s choices,” says Brooks. “You can dispute what he did, but he got as much of the loaf as he thought he could get given the factions of his caucus and Trump’s peculiarities. Did he like being speaker of the House? The results speak for themselves: He’s leaving.”
In this telling, Ryan’s principled vision was foiled by Trump’s ascendancy. Faced with a Republican president he had never expected, and managing a restive majority that mostly agreed on being disagreeable, Ryan defaulted to the lowest common denominator of Republican Party policy: unpaid-for tax cuts for the rich, increases in defense spending, and failed attempts to repeal Obamacare.
This is more or less the defense Ryan has offered of his tenure. “I think some people would like me to start a civil war in our party and achieve nothing,” he told the New York Times. Trump had no appetite for cutting entitlements, so Ryan got what he could, and he got out.
But would it have started a civil war in the Republican Party if the most publicly anti-deficit politician of his generation had simply refused to pass laws that increased the deficit? And even if it had, isn’t that the war Ryan had promised?
The question here is not why Ryan didn’t live up to a liberal philosophy of government; it’s why he didn’t live up to his own philosophy of government.
What’s more, Trump was clearly flexible when it came to policy. On the campaign, Trump repeatedly promised he wouldn’t cut Medicaid; as president, he endorsed legislation Ryan wrote that did exactly that. After winning the election, Trump promised he’d replace Obamacare with a plan that offered “insurance for everybody” with “much lower deductibles,” but he ultimately backed Ryan’s bill to take Obamacare away from millions and push the system toward higher-deductible plans. For Ryan to claim he was not driving the policy agenda in the Trump years is ridiculous.
Ryan proved himself and his party to be exactly what the critics said: monomaniacally focused on taking health insurance from the poor, cutting taxes for the rich, and spending more on the Pentagon. And he proved that Republicans were willing to betray their promises and, in their embrace of Trump, violate basic decency to achieve those goals.
Ryan clearly wishes Donald Trump had lost the primary, and his early exit from the speakership reflects it. As such, a lot of the narrative around Ryan’s retirement has emphasized his discontinuities with Trump, and whether he did enough to voice them. In the New York Times, for instance, Mark Leibovich wrote:
As has been strenuously noted, Trump and Ryan are stylistic and philosophical opposites: Trump the blunt-force agitator vs. Ryan the think-tank conservative. Trump lashes out while Ryan treads carefully. Ryan still fashions himself a “policy guy” and a man of ideas: In high school, he read the conservative philosopher Ayn Rand and was captivated by her signature work, “Atlas Shrugged.” He bills himself as a guardian of the free-trading, debt-shrinking notions that Republican-led governments used to stand for before Trump crashed the tent.
But more important than the differences between Ryan and Trump are the similarities. Yes, Ryan is decorous and polite where Trump is confrontational and uncouth, but the say-anything brand of politics that so outrages Trump’s critics is no less present in Ryan’s recent history. How else can we read a politician who rose to power promising to reduce deficits only to increase them at every turn? Or a politician who raked in good press for promising anti-poverty policies that he subsequently refused to pass?
And as ridiculous as some of Trump’s claims have been, his baldfaced lies that his inauguration was better-attended than Obama’s was a less consequential violation of the truth than what Ryan said when asked about the tax bill: “I don’t think it will increase the deficit.” Note that the tax bill is already increasing the deficit.
Ryan’s campaign for his failed Obamacare repeal bill was thick with similarly brazen deceptions, like that the legislation would strengthen protections for preexisting conditions, when in fact it would gut them.
“What made Ryan attractive to analysts and journalists across the spectrum was that he’d engage in a thoughtful dialogue with you,” says Bob Greenstein, president of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “but that didn’t mean that 10 minutes later, in front of the cameras, he wouldn’t say something that was at best misleading and at worst invalid.”
In important ways, Trump is not a break from the Republican Party’s recent past but an acceleration of it. A party that acculturates itself, its base, and its media sphere to constant nonsense can hardly complain when other political entrepreneurs notice that nonsense sells and decide to begin marketing their own brand of flimflam.
Ultimately, Ryan put himself forward as a test of a simple, but important, proposition: Is fiscal responsibility something Republicans believe in or something they simply weaponize against Democrats to win back power so they can pass tax cuts and defense spending? Over the past three years, he provided a clear answer. That is his legacy, and it will haunt his successors.
Sooner or later, Trump’s presidency will end, and there will come a new generation of Republicans who want to separate themselves from the embarrassments of their party’s record. As Ryan did, they will present themselves as appalled by both their party’s past and the Democrats’ present, and they will promise to lead into a more responsible future. The first question they will face, and the hardest one to answer, will be: Why should anyone believe they’re not just another Paul Ryan?
Is there any doubt-- can there be any doubt-- that Ryan deserves the new Post Bottomless Pinocchio rating category every bit as much as Trump does? Or almost as much.
Labels: budget deficits, Ezra Klein, fact checks, Greg Sargent, lies
