Trump’s Lying Industrial Complex | Salon.com

Lying and denial go hand in hand. Every time a lie is told, a denial must be made to protect the lie by denying that it is a lie. What Donald Trump realized decades ago when he was seeking fame in the New York tabloids is that his denials needed no facts or evidence to back them up. Protecting his lies required repetition, first the lie, then the denial, then the attacks on his accusers.

It has been written that Trump learned this from his mentor, Roy Cohn, who was a criminal lawyer in both senses of the word. But Trump didn’t need to learn to lie and protect his lies from Roy Cohn. His own father taught him a master class in lying with his racist practice of refusing to rent apartments to black people or of “driving” them into substandard housing and charging them more rent than he charged whites.

Donald Trump began working for his father’s real estate company in 1968, according to a 2016 New York Times article. He visited construction sites driven in his father’s Cadillac by a black chauffeur and accompanied his father on visits to building managers of Trump rental properties. In 1973, the Justice Department sued the Trump Company, then known as Trump Management Inc., under the Fair Housing Act for racially discriminating against blacks. Donald Trump was named in the suit, along with his father, Fred Trump. Instead of settling with the government as other real estate companies had done when confronted with their racist practices, the Trumps hired Roy Cohn and went on the offensive, denying the DOJ’s charges and even filing his own $100 million defamation suit against the government. Cohn and the Trumps also took to the media, accusing the government of trying to force them to rent to “welfare recipients” and engaging in character assassination against government lawyers, even filing a indictment for contempt of court against a government lawyer, accusing her of “turning the investigation into a ‘Gestapo-like interrogation,'” according to the Times report.

The case dragged on for two years. Ultimately, the judge dismissed both the contempt charge and the defamation counterclaim, and the Trumps signed a consent decree, which Donald Trump said was a “victory” because the Trump Company had not admitted guilt. (Consent decrees do not usually include an admission of guilt.)

However, Trump’s company did not end its discriminatory racist practices. In the years since, a DOJ investigation found that the Trumps were segregating black tenants in what the Times called “a small number of complexes” where tenants complained of “falling plaster on rusted light fixtures on floors stained with blood”. The DOJ threatened to file another lawsuit, but the Trump company “worn out the government” with delaying tactics and denials, according to the Times. The consent decree expired before the DOJ could file a new case.

I’m going to stop right here and ask the question: Does this sound familiar?

Of course yes.

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

Trump spreads lie after lie about immigrants, claiming that tens of thousands of “illegal” immigrants descended on the city of Springfield, Ohio, population 58,000, taking people’s jobs , eating their cats and committing crimes such as murder and rape. He tells lies about other towns like Aurora, Colorado, where immigrant “gangs” are taking over entire apartment complexes “with AK-47s and they’re going to take over the whole damn state when they’re done, unless I’m president .” He has even discovered a new lie, that immigrants are crossing the border into Mexico “from the Congo. Many people from the Congo. I don’t know what it is, but they come out of prisons in the Congo.”

He tells this lie at each of his rallies, accusing President Biden and Vice President Harris of “letting in criminals from ‘lunatic asylums that are mental institutions on steroids'” through what he calls the “immigrant phone app Kamala”. It has a phone app. It’s meant for cartel bosses. Cartel bosses call the app and tell them where to drop off illegal migrants… It’s not even believable.”

He lies about his position on abortion – he was for it before he was against it, and look now, he’s pro-abortion in states that want it as long as people vote for it…or some thing anyway. He lies about the economy, that “his” economy was the greatest in history, and that current inflation is “the highest it’s ever been.”

Donald Trump is not content with just lies and more lies, overwhelming any attempt to follow him. Now Trump is calling for an end to fact-checking by reporters at every type of news organization. After first scheduling the interview with CBS’s “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 verify the facts 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 to one” because debate moderators had corrected the former president when he claimed that Haitian immigrants they ate the pets. of neighbors in Springfield, Ohio. Debate moderator David Muir said Springfield’s city manager told ABC News that “there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by people in the immigrant community.”

The Washington Post reported that Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita “lashed out” at ABC executives in the middle of the debate because Trump was fact-checked and demanded that fact-checking stop for the rest of the debate . Trump has recently begun threatening to cancel the broadcast licenses of networks that have not covered his campaign “fairly.” In the past, he has regularly called entire television networks like CNN “fake news” and “enemies of the people,” using a phrase commonly uttered by dictators like Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler.

During the vice presidential debate, Vance claimed that Democrats support a form of abortion that kills babies after they leave the womb and that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are “illegal” . As CBS News moderator Margaret Brennan rightly said, the Haitian immigrants in Springfield are in this country under legal “temporary protected status,” and there is no state in the nation where it is legal to kill babies after the birth

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Vance’s response to moderator Brennan’s real-time fact-checking sums up Trump’s new paradigm that he and his running mate have the right to lie without being corrected. “Margaret, the rules were you guys weren’t going to fact check,” Vance yelled.

Since he first announced he was running for president in 2015, Trump’s calculation has been that if he tells lies and repeats them over and over again, neither Democrats nor mainstream news organizations will be able to follow him. The Washington Post attempted to catalog Trump’s lies during his administration, counting more than 30,000 in total, which adds up to more than 20 lies per day. But it was an attempt to record the number of lies after the fact. Real-time fact-checking has gotten under his skin this time, though. Trump is regularly reported to change the lies he tells, adding to the number he uses for undocumented immigrants: it’s 15 million, then 20 million, then 25 million. This reflects Trump’s conclusion that it doesn’t matter how you lie; you just keep lying.

But it does matter. The number of rioters convicted of crimes at the Capitol on January 6 continues to grow. Trump still faces felony charges for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Trump maintains his innocence, but his 34 felony convictions remain. His adjudication as a violator in the defamation case filed by E. Jean Carroll and the judgment of millions against him remain in effect.

The problem with Trump’s lies is not the number of them or even the number of lies; fact-checking helps, as does proof of their falsity. Ultimately, the solution is at the polls, where counting votes matters and lies don’t.