Trump campaign spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany was the latest to be so bold as to argue that Trump has never lied. Appearing on CNN with Chris Cuomo on Wednesday night, Cuomo repeatedly pressed her on this point. And she confirmed multiple times that Trump has never lied.
“No, I don’t think the president has lied,” she said twice.
It’s not the first time a Trump ally has said this, but it’s perhaps the most direct denial.
Generally, when they’ve been asked this question, they’ll dance around it a little bit.
Just this week, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham told The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi much the same thing as McEnany. But she said: “I don’t think they’re lies. … I think the president communicates in a way that some people, especially the media, aren’t necessarily comfortable with. A lot of times they take him so literally. I know people will roll their eyes if I say he was just kidding or was speaking in hypotheticals, but sometimes he is.”
Former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon offered a similar explanation last year. “Not to my knowledge, no,” he said when asked if Trump has ever lied. When pressed, he explained, “I think he speaks in a particular vernacular that connects to people in this country.”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) left CNN’s Anderson Cooper dumbfounded when he made such an argument in April 2018. After trying to steer the conversation in a different direction — as McEnany did — Jordan finally took the same position.
You can practically see him squirm in the transcript:
COOPER: So you have heard the President lie? You haven’t heard the President lie?JORDAN: I’ve not heard the President -- he’s always been square with me. That’s for darn sure.COOPER: What about the American people?JORDAN: The American people elected him president of the United States.COOPER: OK. But I mean, have you ever the President lie? That's why I'm asking you?JORDAN: I have not. And the American people feel like the treatment he’s receiving from the top people of the FBI --COOPER: A, I don't think you can talk about all the American people. But I'm asking you -- just yourself, have you ever heard the President lie?JORDAN: I have not.COOPER: Really? So when the Washington Post counts hundreds and hundreds of times, none of those are believable to you.JORDAN: I have not seen what the Washington Post reported. You are asking me if the President communicated something it wasn't accurate to me, I'm not --COOPER: No. No, not to you. Has the President publicly said anything that is a lie?JORDAN: I mean, look, I don’t know of it. Nothing comes to mind. But look, people who talk as much as you and I do, my guess is probably, Anderson, you may have said something at some point that wasn’t 100 percent accurate.
Perhaps the most telling answer to this question, though, came from Kellyanne Conway, whom Cuomo pressed in August 2018 on whether Trump had lied about affairs with women.
“The president has said that he has not lied,” Conway said, laying the claim at Trump’s feet rather than making it herself. As I’ve written, this is a familiar tactic when Trump spokespeople don’t want to put their own credibility on the line for their boss. (Generally, it’s assumed that aides are speaking for their boss, but Trump has forced so many of them to vouch for untrue things, they’ve had to adapt.)
Update: Now yet another Trump loyalist, Fox Business Network host Stuart Varney, is saying Trump has never lied to the American people. Varney made the claim while talking to GOP presidential candidate Joe Walsh. “He exaggerates and spins,” Varney assured, but said Trump has never lied.
Joe Walsh is bad, but I suppose he has some utility as a foil for others to beclown themselves pic.twitter.com/WLGreEcpM1
— Liam Donovan (@LPDonovan) August 30, 2019
Trump has most definitely lied. The media gets plenty of criticism for not calling specific false claims by Trump “lies” — a term The Washington Post has used only in the rare case it could ascertain Trump knew what he was saying was dishonest and said it anyway. That’s because it is so difficult to get inside his head in every individual case.
Certainly no spokesman wants to concede a boss has been untruthful, but Trump has, and he has done it so often that it’s astounding to watch those close to him try to deny or deflect it.
But the question of whether Trump knowingly lied, and whether it should be labeled as such, often misses the point. We know Trump has said thousands upon thousands of false things — some of them repeated dozens of times, even after they have been proved false. Is it really more comforting to believe he has done this because he doesn’t know any better? You could sure make an argument that it’s preferable to have a serially and intentionally dishonest president than one who is so divorced from reality and can’t comprehend basic facts. (And to be clear, in many cases, we’re talking about very basic facts.)
It’s the “stupid or liar” dichotomy I’ve written about before, and it’s one of the central theoretical debates we can have about Trump’s presidency, which has set a new standard for false claims by a politician. But the fact remains that neither is a good option, so we’re kind of talking past one another.
What we can say is that anybody who says Trump has never lied or been intentionally deceptive is not being honest — at least with themselves and almost definitely not with us. And the fact that so many of them have made this laughable claim in public is a pretty good indicator of how much sycophancy Trump demands and ultimately extracts from those around him.
