Background Analyze the Evidence AAA ATT Activity: Does Lying Matter in a President? Once when President Trump was a private businessman, he said that the tiles in the nursery at his club in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, had been made by Walt Disney himself. When Trump's head butler at Mar-a-Lago quickly corrected Trump that they had not been designed or made by Disney, Trump turned and responded, "Who cares?" All politicians lie at one time or another. President Nixon lied about his involvement in Watergate; Ronald Reagan claimed he knew nothing about the Iran-Contra matter when there is good evidence he did; and Bill Clinton lied about his sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. But most politicians lie about something that threatens the viability of their presidencies or are trying to protect their own reputations. Almost all presidents keep the lying to a manageable minimum because they covet a reliable reputation among the people. It is important to their futures that the people believe in their credibility, and they would not squander that reputation for anything. Donald Trump, however, is different, as the lie about the Disney tiles indicates. He lies frequently, he lies about matters that don't really matter, and he seems to believe that nobody cares that he lies about so many things. Newspapers have begun to keep a tally of the frequency of the president's lies. During Donald Trump's presidency, he told approximately 20,000 lies. The quantity of the lies begs the question - to what political advantage or purpose was the president lying? Surely not to protect his reputation or to protect his presidency. The evidence indicates, in fact, that he did some damage to his presidency; there is strong evidence that a low opinion of his character and his propensity to lie may have cost him reelection in 2020. People who have known the president for a long time have suggested that the president lies frequently and compulsively because that is the habit of his life no more. There is no grand strategy in it. The president has admitted as much. When talking with the prime minister of Canada, he made the false claim that the US had a trade deficit with Canada. It does not, as the prime minister pointed out. The president later admitted in private, "I didn't even know. ... I had no idea. I just said, 'You're wrong."" Again, all this pointless lying does not seem to give a strategic advantage to the president; he just can not help himself. But what about the American public. Journalists say about the president's supporters that they do not take him literally, but they do take him seriously. This suggests that they know and accept that he lies without compunction and are not worried about it, because they agree with him on the serious things. But is this really the case? Psychologists tell us that assessing honesty requires hard work. That is because people filter information two times over. In the first split second, everyone simply accepts an assertion as true. The next few seconds, hours, and weeks are the hard work. That is when we apply our skeptical minds to the assertion and then assess the truthfulness of it. There are two things that possibly would challenge this activation of skepticism. The first is giving in to one's own true-believer position that does not want to hear the truth. The second is an environment of so much lving that one can not afford the time it takes to assess the truth If lies come on the heels of more lies the environment of so much lying that one can not afford the time it takes to assess the truth. If lies come on the heels of more lies, the environment is infected with half-truths and lies and, after a while, people do not know what to believe. Background Analyze the Evidence So what is the case with this new presidential practice of lying frequently. Historic polls before the Trump administration showed that Americans consistently and overwhelmingly believed that honesty was a necessary character requirement of a president of the US. Now, rather than concur with the idea that honesty is no longer necessary in a president, a recent poll seems to suggest that the president's supporters, mostly among Republicans, may be acting like true-believers choosing to believe that he is telling the truth despite considerable evidence to the contrary. This mass psychological phenomenon was recently exposed when President Trump insisted that he won the 2020 presidential election even though he lost by about 80 electoral votes (five states) and seven million popular votes -- one of the largest vote margins in the last 40 years. He repeated the lie over and over, members of his own party repeated the lies and the conservative media also repeated the lie for two months, even after major new organizations called the election, after the states all certified their votes and legitimate and fair and after the Electoral College met and sealed the election for President Joe Biden. Nevertheless, the lying continued through to January 6, 2021, when Congress met to simply open the vote totals from the Electoral College. President Trump again lied and told his followers that the election could be overturned in this Congressional session, which it could not. Trump summoned 30,000 of his followers to Washington DC, incited them with hot rhetoric called "Stop the Steal" and encouraged them to march to the Capitol building. Unfortunately, the crowd became a mob and crashed through the doors and windows of the building threatening to take the legislators hostage and even killing them if necessary; the police got control of the building and Congress met into the night to certify the vote for Joe Biden. They were unsuccessful, but the legacy of this incident will either be that a president can use lying to get what he wants, or because the mob was unsuccessful, future politics will remember this incident and become more serious about the danger of public officials telling outright lies. Percentage Believing that President Trump Lies Most or All of the Time Democrats Independents Republicans 94 percent 76 percent 22 percent AAALATT Background Analyze the Evidence Analyze the Evidence Question How important is it to democracy to have an environment where officials try to be honest and give correct information? White 100 words in response to the question. 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