ART OF THE LIE: Carter/Reagan/Biden/Trump
Many casual voters—and most GOP politicians—discount Donald Trump’s deluge of
lies: “Well, they all lie.”
That’s right—and wrong.
True, even the venerable Eisenhower lied about U-2 flights over the Soviet Union. Kennedy about his Addison’s disease. Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin. Nixon about Watergate. Clinton about Monica Lewinsky.
Not to excuse them, but each president convinced himself that exigent political circumstances justified it.
Now comes Donald Trump—a unicorn of untruth, who lies daily, hourly, incorrigibly. A democracy can survive one or a handful of liars. But his astonishing volume adds up to something more dangerous than its parts: a system-shaking breach of the mutual trust that self-government requires.
A brief presidential comparison helps clarify why Trump’s chronic disinformation is not just another character flaw but a hub for all his other misconduct, and a slow-motion calamity for American democracy.
Jimmy Carter
True to his core campaign pledge—“I will never lie to you”—biographer Jonathan Alter couldn’t find a single example of Carter telling a deliberate falsehood.
Whatever one thought of his policies or pieties, the devout Naval Academy straight-arrow simply couldn’t include lies in his quiver.
Ronald Reagan
When I appeared on Good Morning America to discuss my 1986 book Reagan’s Reign of Error, his Chief of Staff James Baker, watching from the green room, was overheard saying: “No, no. He was sincere and didn’t intentionally lie.”
Baker wasn’t entirely wrong.
Reagan often "misspoke," as noted by biographers Lou Cannon and Max Boot—a habit of anecdotage tracing back to his careers as a Hollywood actor and radio sportscaster where he recreated baseball games from telegraph reports without attending in person.
One example: Reagan served as an Army officer in WWII but never left the States. Yet years later, he spoke so vividly about the Holocaust that both Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal believed he had personally visited the concentration camps.
There were serious consequences to more deliberate dishonesty—especially his denials in the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostage scandal, which nearly led to impeachment. But most of Reagan’s “stretchers,” in Mark Twain’s useful phrase, were rhetorical flourishes that wowed after-dinner audiences and burnished his anti-government prejudices.
He was a serial exaggerator though not a malicious deceiver.
His son Ron once told me his father couldn’t resist audience-pleasing one-liners “because he really wanted them to be true.” His two wives agreed: Reagan was ambitious but kind-hearted—an adjective no one has yet applied to Trump.
Joe Biden
Jake Tapper’s recent bestseller Original Sin concludes that Biden “covered up” his cognitive decline so he could run for reelection...until he couldn’t.
Two things:
First, whether due to a childhood stutter or standard political posturing, Biden certainly trafficked in gaffes, blunders, and embellishments—like plagiarizing Neil Kinnock’s speeches in 1988, or overstating his student civil rights activism in 2008.
But after five decades in public life, he is not known for habitual lying. Despite years of GOP accusations, there’s zero verified evidence that he used the Oval Office to financially assist Hunter Biden, or "weaponized" the DOJ to indict Trump.
Second, Tapper may be right that Biden lied about his cognition—though largely to himself. He believed he was still effective despite losing his fastball and having the shuffle of an elderly man. His first debate performance certainly belied his sunny confidence—though not the reality of his legislative achievements, arguably the most consequential in a single term since LBJ.
Self-deception is a personality flaw, especially in presidents. But it’s not in the same galaxy as Trump’s industrial-scale disinformation. Saying Biden and Trump are equally dishonest is like saying elephants and ants are similar because they both belong to the animal kingdom.
Donald Trump
Trump’s lies are not occasional, innocuous, or public-spirited. They are strategic and relentless—part of a deliberate effort to reshape the federal government into something more akin to monarchy. Despite the coincidence of names, no one ever confused George Washington with King George.
Thanks to a narrow but impressive 2024 victory, Trump is a convincing liar—maybe even a better performer than Reagan after decades of honing his act on talk shows, at rallies, and on TV. But his “twistifications” (a Jefferson coinage) carry darker motives and generate more falsehoods than any president ever.
Two insiders spilled the beans: when Billy Bush asked why he lied about The Apprentice’s ratings, Trump replied: “Look, you just tell them and they believe it. They just do,” later adding, to a White House aide: “It doesn’t matter what you say, so long as you repeat it.” And when NY Observer editor Elizabeth Spiers asked Jared Kushner if Trump really believed Obama was born in Kenya, she reports he replied: “He doesn’t really believe it. He just knows Republicans are stupid and they'll buy it.”
No surprise, then, that the Washington Post cataloged 34,000+ lies or falsehoods in his first term. Some were absurd, others potentially lethal: COVID-19 was “like the flu” and would vanish; the 2020 election was stolen due to “massive fraud”; Ukraine forced Putin to invade; Biden and Clinton were criminals.
These weren’t gaffes. They were Big Lies—meant to distort democracy, justice, science, race, and national security.
And now, in Term Two, Trump wakes up every morning believing he’s beyond legal or political accountability since he:
will never be on a ballot again;
was acquitted twice by a cowardly Senate;
was granted sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution by a stacked Supreme Court;
avoided verdicts on most of his felony counts;
was sustained by a compliant GOP Congress and defanged watchdogs.
That’s a presidential jackpot—like winning two trifectas in a row. So just this past week, he:
Said South Africa is promoting the murder of white farmers (“a reverse apartheid”) using fake images from the Congo;
Took credit for an India-Pakistan ceasefire that both nations said didn’t happen;
Tried to expel 7,000 Harvard students, falsely accusing the university—run by a Jewish president—of systemic antisemitism;
Pardoned big donors and Republican politicians convicted of corruption;
Pocketed billions via meme coins, crypto, and private jets—despite the Emoluments Clause
No modern president remotely compares. Most prominently, FDR was obsessive about accuracy. Speechwriter Robert Sherwood recalled that Roosevelt believed:
“The President of the United States must not make a mistake…The White House had a resident statistician to check every decimal point.”
Trump Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is the opposite—daily acting like a Pompeii resident denying Mt. Vesuvius erupted while covered in ash.
So there’s been a kind of Reverse Darwinism from FDR to Trump. Just today we have: a pending "Billionaires Budget Bill" that balloons debt and inequality and also kicks 14 million off Medicare; Orwell-level redefinitions of “diversity” to cater to white nationalists: and three federal courts ruling against #47’s tariffs, law firm retaliations and attempted take-over of Harvard. Democratic and Republican judges agree that his assertions are not to be believed.
What happens now if Congress, the Supreme Court, the media, and voters can’t constrain Trump’s appetite for Caesarism fused with Plutocracy? Philosopher Sissela Bok offered a chilling answer in her 1978 classic Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life:
“Imagine a society where word and gesture could never be counted upon.
Questions asked, answers given, information exchanged—all would be worthless.”
That is no longer a thought experiment. It is Trump’s—and MAGA’s—closing argument.
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