Courtesy of Pam Martens.
President Donald Trump
On Monday, Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University, wrote an opinion piece for Bloomberg News that offered several thought-provoking reasons that Trump and his staff are willing to tell bald-faced lies that are easily debunked. The column came after a weekend where Trump and his staff appeared neurotically obsessed to convince big media that Trump is the most popular president in history, notwithstanding the hundreds of thousands of protesters against his presidency that filled Washington D.C. and other major cities around the country on Saturday.
Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer stated on Saturday that “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.” Spicer went on to assail the media’s “attempts to lessen the enthusiasm for the inauguration” as “shameful and wrong.” The Washington Post easily debunked the claims with facts and photos.
In Trump’s CIA speech Saturday, he obsessed further about his inauguration crowds, stating: “We had a massive field of people. You saw that. Packed. I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks, and they show an empty field. I’m like, wait a minute. I made a speech. I looked out, the field was, it looked like a million, million and a half people. They showed a field where there were practically nobody standing there.”
In Trump’s first White House interview with ABC News, he obsessed further: “I would have won the popular vote if I were campaigning for the popular vote,” adding that “We had the biggest audience in the history of inaugural speeches.”
Tyler Cowen’s Bloomberg column hypothesizes that Trump’s lies “represent a belief that a lot can be pushed through fairly quickly, bundled with some obfuscation of the truth, and that long-term credibility does not need to be maintained.” We think there’s a far more dangerous motive at work here.
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