Why Can’t Trump Just Tell Lies?

As far as I’m concerned, Joe Biden has cemented himself in the top rank of American Presidents not by what he has done legislatively over the past four years, but by his decision to step aside and allow Kamala Harris to run for the office of President in his place.

Because what Kamala represents is, for me, the culmination of two enormously meaningful shifts in American life, which has been the shift away from a society run at the top by white men and now a society whose leadership is both female and black.

Obama’s 2008 campaign got us halfway there, Kamala’s 2024 effort finishes the job. The problem, of course, is that someone’s trying to keep Kamala from getting to the finish line in first place, and that someone happens to be Donald Trump, who is today allegedly answering questions being asked by a panel at a meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists, an appearance which sparked a significant debate within the organization it self as to whether or not Trump should have been allowed to show up and speak.

I only caught the last part of Trump’s performance, but what continues to impress me about him is how he so blithely and continuously makes statements which are completely and totally untrue. And when he’s confronted with the falsity of his remarks, he responds to such challenges by simply repeating the same erroneous statement again.

Example which I just heard: “The average American family has to pay 50 percent more for groceries than they had to pay just a shirt time ago.” This was part of Trump’s answer to a question about what he would do on Day 1 of his next term.

In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is charged, among other things, with keeping track of the costs of store-bought food, the consumer price index increased by 20 percent between April, 2021 and February, 2023 and has remained steady since that latter date.

Now maybe Trump has enlisted some other organization to give him the data on inflation, but most of us tend to stick with the numbers published monthly by the Labor Department whose data doesn’t even begin to support what Trump said today not at a campaign rally where every candidate tends to say things which tend to be somewhat grandiose and on the edge of reality at best,