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Calmes: Donald Trump turns on a firehose of lies as the election nears. It matters

If his lips are moving, he’s lying.

The New York Times fact-checked Trump’s 63-minute jabbering at a recent Las Vegas campaign stop and found 64 false, inaccurate or misleading remarks — one a minute. That mendacity wasn’t even a record. A contender for the distinction would be Trump’s 64-minute August news conference at Mar-a-Lago that was more monologue than Q&A: He racked up at least 162 lies, misstatements and vast exaggerations by NPR’s count — about 2.5 a minute.

And of course there’s the final tally on his presidency from the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, dispenser of those ignominious Pinocchios: a total 30,573 lies and misleading statements and tweets. That’s nearly 20 a day, starting on Day 1 with Trump’s lies about the size of his inauguration crowd and the weather — he denied it rained, when former President George W. Bush’s meme-worthy struggles with a poncho clearly proved otherwise — and, in his inaugural address, about the supposed “carnage” he’d inherited. (“That was some weird s—,” Bush muttered as he exited.)

Trump has been lying ever since, most ominously in still denying his 2020 defeat at virtually every rally. The dishonesty has mounted as he runs again for reelection. Pathological lying ought to be a disqualifier for the office, yet for nearly half the electorate it’s not. Sure, shading the truth is a feature of politics, not a bug. But lying on Trump’s scale is a bug, and a venomous one.

The lies are bad enough, but it’s why he’s lying that’s even more disqualifying: to divide us, between “patriots” who support him and those who are un-American because they do not. It’s what he’s lying about: matters that should unite Americans, such as disaster responses, the U.S. standing in the world at times of crises, the integrity of our elections and the facts about the unprecedented insurrection on Jan. 6. And it’s how he gets away with it: by discrediting a free press and playing to propagandist channels of the right.

Take Trump’s reaction to the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene throughout the South, the worst since Katrina two decades ago. Back then Bush was criticized for the actual dilatory incompetence of Washington’s disaster response, even by many Republicans. But Trump is assailing rival Kamala Harris and President Biden for their administration’s reaction to Helene based on fabrications.

No sooner had Trump landed in stricken Valdosta, Ga., on Monday than he charged that the federal government was M.I.A., and that Georgia’s Republican governor was “having a hard time” even getting Biden on the phone. Busted! Gov. Brian Kemp himself had earlier told reporters that Biden called him on the previous day to make sure Kemp had all he needed and to urge him to call directly for anything else. The Republican governors of South Carolina and Virginia praised the federal response as well.

At the Valdosta stop, Trump boasted that he’d gotten his buddy Elon Musk to send Starlink satellites into North Carolina. The Federal Emergency Management Agency already had dispatched 40 Starlinks to the state to restore communications. On Sunday, Trump opened a rally in Erie, Pa., by first insisting he won the battleground state in 2020 (“Bad things happened”) and then lying that, as responders searched for bodies through obliterated towns, Biden was “in Delaware sleeping right now in one of his many estates” and “Lyin’ Kamala” was fundraising. (As usual, he mispronounced her name.)

This from the man who, as president, withheld money from hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico for years and on a belated visit tossed paper towels at needy residents. Who repeatedly threatened to block money from blue-state governors, notably California’s Gavin Newsom during the 2018 wildfires, while promising “A-plus” treatment for states whose governors supported him. Last month, he re-upped that threat against “Newscum.”

In his nearly two-hour harangue in Erie, Trump expanded on his fearmongering falsification in weekend social media posts about newly released data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Harris, he said, “let in 13,099 convicted murderers,” and thousands more migrants convicted of rape and assault. “SHE HAS GOT BLOOD ON HER HANDS!” he posted on Friday. “Thugs and slimeballs” were “totally unvetted and unchecked,” he wrote on Saturday

In fact, the ICE data covered migrants who entered over more than four decades — including during Trump’s term — and most are in local, state or federal custody or had served sentences. All are tracked by ICE, incarcerated or not.

Trump lied in Pennsylvania that he’d been forced to shrink a rally the day before in Wisconsin from a fictitious 50,000 attendees to 1,000 because the Biden administration “wouldn’t let” the Secret Service have adequate staffing to protect him. He repeated his oft-debunked falsehood that on Jan. 6, “Crazy Nancy Pelosi” rejected his offer for 10,000 National Guard troops and that she’d taken responsibility for the violence. “And then they try and blame me for it!” he whined. In fact, Trump’s own Pentagon chief, among others, said under oath that Trump issued no such orders, including during the three hours that the then-commander in chief watched the mayhem on TV.

As his White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, told the nation in August from the Democratic National Convention: “He used to tell me, ‘It doesn't matter what you say, Stephanie — say it enough and people will believe you.’ But it does matter — what you say matters, and what you don't say matters.”

Words do matter. Lies really matter. And an inveterate liar should be nowhere near the Oval Office.

@jackiekcalmes

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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