Opinion: A nation can only survive if truth is the core of public talks

There’s no doubt every human being with a mature cognitive ability has lied at some point in their lifetime. That’s an irrefutable statement you can take to the bank every day and twice on Sundays. The problem isn’t that humans lie. It’s what they lie about and why they lie.

I write about lying today because I want to interrogate why President Donald Trump is such an irredeemable lair. The man suffers from a pathos – an incurable pathology for lying.

He seems hardwired as a liar. His default position every single time he speaks is to lie. He appears programmed to lie. He’s the king of the lie. Why does the leader of the Free World lie so much?

On May 1, the Washington Post, one of the world’s leading papers, reported that Mr Trump had lied 3,001 times in 466 days since he took office. That’s an average of 6.5 lies a day.

The Post also reported that Trump’s lying has escalated – he now lies more than he did when he did before. To put it mildly, no American President has had such a casual relationship with the truth.

Some people will take issue with the provable claims that Trump is a damned liar. That’s because such people have been blinded by political or racial considerations to give Trump a mulligan [a pass] from telling the truth. Such apologists have themselves become liars.

In our post-truth world, liars parse the meaning of the word “lie” and offer all manner of pitiable excuses.

They speak of “alternative facts.” A lie has many equivalents including the following – misleading statements, dissembling, deception, half-truths, lies by omission – which they call incomplete statements, evasion, hyperbole, prevarication, falsification, distortion, disinformation, misrepresentation, defamation, tall tales, fabrication, perjury, forgery, fiction, and fraud. There are many others.

All of them are grouped into “objective” or “constructive” lies. It’s the intent and the motive that matters, not the word used. By this measure, Trump and his spokespersons – including current White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders – are world-class liars. They haven’t met an unpalatable truth they didn’t want to deny.

Not all lying is bad. Sometimes the only moral thing to do is to lie. Take the case of a gun-toting intruder who invades your home. You would be foolish to admit to him that you are home with your spouse.

You are better off telling him that you are home alone so that he doesn’t harm her too. Lies to prevent illegal, immoral, or deadly crimes from being committed are an exercise in good judgment. Such statements are not lies at all – they are defensive statements born of virtuous necessity. But falsehoods told to cover up a crime or perpetrate a harm are lies per se. Trump’s relationship with the truth falls in the latter category.

Here are some of Trump’s lies. Even before he became President of the United States, Trump was a bona fide liar. He lied – repeatedly – that Barack Obama, then US President, was born in Kenya and therefore in office illegally. Obama was born in Hawaii, an American state, to a white American mother and a black Kenyan father.

He was a “natural born” citizen of the US eligible to be US President. He would still have been a “natural born” citizen eligible to be US President even if he had been born in Kenya as long as one of his parents was an American citizen. Trump persisted in this lie even after Obama produced his birth certificate.

Trump lies about Obama a lot. He repeatedly said that his inauguration crowd was larger than President Obama’s. He actually sent Sean Spicer, then Press Secretary, to repeat the lie in the regular White House briefing.

He didn’t back down even after the US government – the government of which he is President – showed pictures of his sparse inauguration crowd compared to Obama’s. Trump is an irredeemable racist. His racist statements and actions before and after he became President are indisputable.

The thought that Obama, a black man, is better than him is simply unbearable. He can’t stand the thought. What’s even worse to him is that Obama was elected President before him.

The truth is the foundation of democracy. No democratic state can survive if the truth is not at the centre of public discourse, public institutions, and in the market. There’s nothing like “alternative facts.” Either something is a fact, or it’s lie. There are no alternatives.

The lies that Trump tells strike at the heart of democracy because he seeks to subvert the rule of law. Democrats should hurry up and win the November mid-term election and then impeach him pronto.