Donald Trump has lied his entire life, his biographer says. Surprise, surprise. The president’s biographer appeared on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees and said that at least 45 should get credit for “audacity.” Then, the biographer dove right into an unexplored pool of the president’s lies.
There is something very disturbing about a man who would try to convince a whole country to accept his version of reality – a false reality.
Pulitzer prize-winning Michael D’Antonio wrote The Truth About Trump in 2016. He started off with Cooper talking about some of the liar-in-chief’s aliases. Trump would call reporters pretending to be a public relations man named “John Miller” or “John Barron,” sometimes recounting the pre-president’s sexual prowess.
Cooper commented about how “bizarre” Trump’s actions were:
‘This is just kind of bizarre that he would have done this. It shows the extent to which he wanted to be seen as being incredibly rich and getting his name in the paper and bragging about women he had been with.’
The president would even lie about where “some of the buildings were located” the host said:
‘The blatant lying from citizen Trump, to where some of the buildings were located, goes beyond simply embellishment to outright fabrications.’
Spreading lies in politics has a “special power,” according to POLITICO:”
‘If false information comports with preexisting beliefs—something that is often true in partisan arguments—attempts to refute it can actually backfire, planting it even more firmly in a person’s mind. Trump won over Republican voters, as well as alienated Democrats, by declaring himself opposed to “Washington,” “the establishment” and “political correctness,” and by stoking fears about the Islamic State, immigrants and crime.’
D’Antonio noted that as president of the U.S., he told “2,000 lies:”
‘I guess this is how we get to a president who now told 2,000 lies during his time in office.’
The biographer said Trump would still lie in the face of facts:
‘People will present him with the audio recordings and he will deny that it’s him — even after he admitted it’s him.’
The AC360 host had his own idea about the type of person the president was trying to convince:
‘It’s interesting, though, because a lot of the lies he told in the past, and even nowadays, they require you to be an idiot. They’re sort of based on the idea that the person listening is just dumb and doesn’t put the pieces together.’
Trump’s biographer noted the man in the Oval Office had “incredible amounts of chutpah:”
‘You got to give the guy credit for audacity. He has incredible amounts of chutzpah — and he is not even Jewish.’
Cooper wondered about Trump’s history of lying and asked:
‘As long as you’re been profiling him, has he always been like this?’
D’Antonio responded that the president had been lying since “his school days:”
‘Oh yes. This is Donald, really going back to his school days when he was a boy, he insisted to others that he had hit home runs he had never hit in ball games.’
The biographer noted with a wry twist that Trump said he was awarded “ladies man” in an all-boys school:
‘He left the New York Military Academy declaring himself the greatest baseball player in New York state. And it went on and on and on. He was named the ladies man at a school that had no young women at it.’
According to Leda Cosmides at the University of California, Santa Barbara worked with John Tooby regarding using outrage to mobilize people, POLITICO reported:
‘The campaign was more about outrage than about policies. And when a politician can create a sense of moral outrage, truth ceases to matter. People will go along with the emotion, support the cause and retrench into their own core group identities. The actual substance stops being of any relevance.’
Featured Image via Getty Images.
