Donald Trump's presidency is not off to a good start. It's been one lie after another. So many lies that his mouthpiece, Kellyanne Conway, had to invent a new euphemism for Trump's falsehoods: "alternative facts."
First off, after a dismal, rainy inauguration day, he got into a fight with the press over the size of the crowd. Barack Obama's inauguration attracted two or three times as many spectators as Trump's, yet Trump and his press secretary insisted that it wasn't so, making up all kinds of stupid excuses.
Trump then lied about his rocky relationship with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, claiming that the media made up the "feud." It was Trump himself who on Twitter compared the CIA to Nazis after their report on Russian meddling in the US election on Trump's behalf.
Trump and press secretary Sean Spicer also lied about the number of riders on the Washington metro, compared to Obama's inauguration.
Then there's the lie that his inauguration had the biggest audience ever, in the whole world, in all of history. Trump's TV audience was only 31 million compared to Obama's 38 million and Reagan's 42 million. Sorry, Donny boy: your TV ratings were lower than the black guy and the Gipper's.
Then, to make it even more embarrassing, the next day women across the United States staged huge protests against him. Crowds in Washington for the protest were estimated to be two or three times than Trump's inauguration audience, spilling into the streets all around the mall. In all, tens of millions of people demonstrated against Trump's presidency the day after he assumed office.
But the most curious lie was this:
Mr. Trump said that though he had been “hit by a couple of drops” of rain as he began his address on Inauguration Day, the sky soon cleared. “And the truth is, it stopped immediately, and then became sunny,” he said. “And I walked off, and it poured after I left. It poured.”Trump is implying that God smiled upon him and made the sun shine and the rain stop while he was speaking, as if Trump were the messiah come to deliver a sermon to the masses. He's making myths up about himself on the spot.
The truth is that it began to rain lightly almost exactly as Mr. Trump began to speak and continued to do so throughout his remarks, which lasted about 18 minutes, and after he finished.
People have been comparing Trump to Hitler, but Trump is more like North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un: a raging megalomaniac with delusions of godhood.
The real question is this: do Trump and his surrogates actually believe the endless stream of nonsense they spew? Or are they consciously lying in order to inflame more distrust between his confused followers and the media, hoping that can keep his voters bamboozled for four more years? Or are they simply sowing more chaos to distract from more important issues, such as Trump's crooked dealings with foreign governments, the crooked dealings of his cabinet (like the guy who ran a tax avoidance fund in a foreign country), and the fact that Trump hasn't paid any taxes in the last 20 or 30 years?
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