Donald Trump has been smearing the country with a term he lifted, “truthful hyperbole” aka “lies.” Our president of these United States lies 70 percent of the time. Finally, someone has decided to hold the liar-in-chief accountable.
Can the president help himself? Apparently so, because there is that 30 percent of time he was not lying. Yet, Trump has typically lied, even when it was pointless.
Trump comes from a long line of truth-stretchers. Instead of carrying the dignity of the Oval Office, he sounds like a used salesman on a third-rate lot.
After a year of embarrassing the nation, someone finally stood up and said, “Enough!” CNN’s Jake Tapper has been calling out Trump on his lies, and he confronted White House counselor and talking head, Kellyanne Conway.
The president’s top aide weasel-worded her way through her interview with Tapper. The show’s host asked her whether Trump knew anything about his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, paying adult entertainment star and producer, Stormy Daniels hush money.
Conway twisted her words with her ever-ready shield of deflection. Then, she tried the look-over-there tactic, returning to the low unemployment and how the networks talked about her boss.
Tapper asked her on his show, State of the Union, if the leader of the free world’s job description “includes lying:”
‘Do you think his job includes lying to the American people? Because, he continues to do so.’
The president’s aide responded by jumping into a vague mode, “he does many things:”
‘He does many things. You just want that to go viral and you want to say President Trump and lie in the same sentence.’
Exasperated, Tapper finally said:
‘No, I would like him to stop lying.’
The show’s host continued, pointing out Trump’s lie about North Korea’s American hostage lie:
‘He talked about the three American hostages (taken by North Korea) and how the Obama administration tried and failed to get them free. Two of the three were detained while Donald Trump was president so there is no way that Obama could have gotten them released because they were captured when Trump was president. That is just a lie and that tweet is still up there. That is just symbolic of the fact that this president gets in his own way all the time even when there is something good happening.’
Rather than respond to Tapper’s legitimate question, Conway tried to bend the audience’s mind around another “truthful hyperbole:”
‘You are focused on the tweet and we are focused on the hostages.’
Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert explained what this intentional Conway and Trump tactic does to people, POLITICO reported:
‘When we are overwhelmed with false, or potentially false, statements, our brains pretty quickly become so overworked that we stop trying to sift through everything.’
According to POLITICO:
‘It doesn’t matter how implausible the statements are; throw out enough of them, and people will inevitably absorb some. Eventually, without quite realizing it, our brains just give up trying to figure out what is true.’
Check out Jake Tapper in action on the CNN video below:
https://youtu.be/XkdMG2imhgA
Featured Image via CNN/YouTube.
