Trump Starts Out with More of the Same--Lies

Donald Trump started off his presidency, on Inauguration Day, with yet another one of his lies. He claimed that his inauguration had drawn the biggest crowd in U.S. history. That was refuted in short order by a news outlet issuing side-by-side photos of the Trump inauguration crowd and the one that Barack Obama drew for his inauguration; the Obama crowd was clearly a lot bigger.

 

Trump and his people promptly claimed all this was a lie and a fraud. I guess we are to believe that the photo of the Obama inauguration audience had been photoshopped.

 

A policeman once told me of a doctrine that they use to help decide if an assertion should be believed. It's known as cui bono, meaning (translated a bit loosely), Who would benefit (if that were true)? In this case, who has more to gain my lying, the Trumpets or the media? (It also reminds me of the attempts of the Nixon administration to discredit the media as a way of deflection criticism or perhaps even scrutiny.)

 

Evidently, in trying to weigh in on whose side should be believed, or the Trumpets' practice of lying, Mr. Spicer, the new White House Press Secretary, used the phrase "alternative facts." This conjures up a very scary, dystopian image such as was depicted in George Orwell's novel 1984, where the government demanded that people believe (in some fashion) things that they knew to be false, or help in their own brainwashing to believe in these incorrect things.

 

Trump, according to a documentary program about him on the PBS series "Frontline," evidently has always believed that he could get away with telling lies. I think in his campaign he exercised the belief that, if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. This is not only cynical, it evokes the tactics of Hitler's propaganda minister Hermann Goering.

 

As I said in a previous blog posting, if only people (when they've heard Trump's lies and before they decide to vote for him) would avail themselves of means (e.g., web sites like FactCheck.org) of ascertaining whether something is true or not.

See a related article:

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/alternative-facts-the-needless-lies-of-the-trump-administration/ar-AAm7jly?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=DELLDHP

 

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