President Donald Trump did not have “the biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan” as he said during his first press conference last week. The fact that he’s wrong doesn’t justify calling him a liar though. It’s an insignificant statement. But like his predecessors, it should serve as a warning that, whenever it serves his own interests, Trump will discard the truth on serious matters.
President Bill Clinton gives us the clearest evidence of a President who lied to the nation when he unequivocally stated “I did not have sexual relations with that women.” His dishonesty, and the impeachment that followed, inflamed the divide between party politicians and their biased supporters in the media and the public.
In June 2011, President Barack Obama took credit for “a new strategy that would end our combat mission in Iraq and remove all of our troops by the end of 2011.” It wasn’t true. What Obama did was follow through on the Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq that had been negotiated by President George W. Bush in 2008. In fact, the Obama administration was unsuccessful in their renegotiation efforts to keep U.S. troops in Iraq beyond that date.
Both sides spun Obama’s misinformation as if it were true. Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi bragged the President was keeping his campaign promise to end the war. And Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, feared “this decision has set in motion events that will come back to haunt our country.”
Now we’re fighting ISIS. Obama’s deception didn’t create that monster though. It just gave the conservative media their talking points to blame him.
Like Trump, Obama had a running feud with his media critics. On September 20, 2009, he snubbed Fox News by giving interviews to all the major networks except theirs.
Now it’s the reverse. During his press conference Trump proclaimed “Fox &Friends” are “very honorable people.” And afterward he tweeted “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”
Not so, according to Quinnipiac. In a poll they conducted last week, 52 percent of voters said they trusted the media more than Trump. They had a similar finding two years ago. At first glance, that poll seemed to support the conservative side. At 29 percent, Fox News rated as the America’s most trusted news channel. But cumulatively, 50 percent found Trump’s five “Fake News” sources more trustworthy than Fox. Add in MSNBC and the so-called left-leaning media was twice as trusted as Fox.
It seemed everyone trusted the media back in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson claimed North Vietnam launched an unprovoked attacked on the USS Maddux in the Gulf of Tonkin. Some people in his administration weren’t convinced though. And they believed if it had happened, that it was probably provoked by the Maddux’s classified, covert support of South Vietnamese sabotage raids against the North. Despite disagreements within his staff, Johnson still went public with the accusation and got near unanimous passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that authorized him to send U.S. troops into combat.
The news media reported the Gulf of Tonkin story as an official truth. Today we know that the attack on the Maddux never happened. If you don’t believe that, read “Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam.” It was written by H. R. McMaster, who earned a promotion to Lieutenant General during the Iraq War and is now Trump’s pick to be his national security advisor.
The tragic consequences of that fateful day aren’t open to partisan dispute. In the years before that, 400 American troops had been killed in Vietnam. Almost 58,000 were lost afterward.
In 2002 the news media beat the war drums right beside President George W. Bush when he made his case against Saddam Hussein. It was as if they forgot truths they reported a year earlier. Secretary of State Colin Powell had said Iraq “has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction.” And Vice-President Dick Cheney proposed lifting sanctions against Saddam’s regime.
Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly accused anyone who thought the weapons didn’t exist as having “anti-American attitude that is driven by a loathing for President Bush.” Eleven months after the invasion he apologized. “I was wrong” he said, “I think all Americans should be concerned about this.”
And we should all be concerned about Trump now. Not because of his fantasy notions about the electoral college margin or the size of the crowd at his inaugural ceremony, but because history tells us we can’t trust the President or the media until we’ve studied all sides of every debated event and policy proposal.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.
