By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, July 27, 2023
If you point out that Donald Trump lies a lot, quite a few Trump fans will respond that Joe Biden lies more and that his lies are worse. If you point out that Biden lies a lot, quite a few Biden fans will make the same argument in reverse.
That so few fans of the two men will even attempt to argue that their guy is fundamentally honest reveals a depressing truth about the state of our politics. These people appear to have convinced themselves that a leader doesn’t really need to be honest when talking to the American people; he just needs to be one iota less dishonest than the other pathological liar.
Trump currently enjoys a strong lead over all his rivals for the GOP presidential nomination, so the question of which man is the bigger or worse liar may well be with us until November 2024. Does it matter which of the two notoriously shameless liars is slightly less dishonest than the other? And if it does, how do we even begin to measure which ill-tempered, shouting, egomaniacal old man is worse?
Biden defenders may concede their man is full of “malarkey,” to use one of the president’s favorite terms, but they’re likely to argue that his lies are mostly harmless exaggerations and much less consequential than Trump’s.
Trump’s most consequential lie is his insistence, contrary to all available evidence and the decisions of multiple courts in multiple jurisdictions, that he won the 2020 presidential election. To this day he contends that his supposed landslide victory was covered up by a cabal of both Democratic and Republican state election officials executing an elaborate and far-reaching scheme to destroy legitimate votes for him and manufacture illegitimate votes for Biden.
These lies led to the Capitol Hill riot of January 6, 2021, in which U.S. Capitol Police shot and killed one woman protester and more than 150 officers were injured, and in the months after which four officers who had responded to the attack committed suicide. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, more than 1,000 individuals have been charged in connection with the riot, almost 600 have pleaded guilty, and 98 have been found guilty at trial. The riot caused more than $2.8 million in damage to the Capitol building and grounds.
Shortly after the election, almost everyone around Trump other than Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani was telling him that he had lost. If Trump had accepted the hard truth and conceded the election, none of the awful events of January 6 would have happened.
Some will offer a qualified defense of Trump and contend he genuinely believes he won the 2020 presidential election. But that doesn’t make what he said any less untrue, or the consequences any less pernicious — and far too many corners of the political Right have wholeheartedly embraced it. Even if you dispute the claim that Trump’s statements qualify as a conscious lie, they sure as hell aren’t the truth.
One of the less compelling defenses of Trump, going back years, is that he should be taken “seriously, not literally.” This is a convenient way of hand-waving away the false claims while insisting that he is telling the truth in some thematic or symbolic — but always conveniently nonspecific — way. It is sometimes a quiet concession of the Trump defender’s wish that what Trump said were actually true. Trump is a troll, and trolling often means lying and later insisting that you were joking the whole time. When a false statement generates more trouble for Trump than usual, he’ll sometimes insist that he was being sarcastic. He claims he was being sarcastic when, during a White House briefing on Covid-19, he turned to Dr. Deborah Birx and said, “I would like you to speak to the medical doctors to see if there’s any way that you can apply light and heat to cure.”
The argument that more-consequential lies should stir more opprobrium is logical. It doesn’t matter that much if your Republican neighbor believes that Trump won the election in 2020 or that he won the popular vote — or, for that matter, if the Democratic neighbor on the other side of your house believes that George W. Bush was “selected, not elected” in 2000 and that in 2004 the Diebold voting machines in Ohio were hacked. But with great power comes great responsibility, and the consequences are far more severe when the sitting president of the United States runs around insisting that the election results are fraudulent and that lots of government officials are involved in a vast conspiracy to rig election results.
The fact that none of Biden’s lies started a riot doesn’t mean that he’s the good guy in this situation, though. Less bad is still bad, and “less bad” is a pretty good way of summarizing the Biden team’s spin on inflation for the past year. (Back in July 2021, when the inflation rate had increased to 5.4 percent and was on its way to reaching 9.1 percent the following June, Biden insisted that “there’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way, no serious economist,” which requires an extremely narrow definition of “unchecked” or “serious economist.”)
Perhaps the most unnervingly plausible defense of the president is that he doesn’t really realize he’s lying and that senility has made it impossible for him to clearly remember the truth, or perceive what the truth is.
Biden defenders would argue that their man mostly serves up tall tales about events from long ago, often barely remembered by anyone beyond the octogenarian in chief. As the New York Times generously described it in an October 2022 headline, “Biden, Storyteller in Chief, Spins Yarns That Often Unravel.” But he isn’t telling campfire stories or offering tall tales over dinner; he’s often attempting to defend his record or attack his rivals.
Biden lies about his policies. One boast he makes with metronomic regularity is that he has “cut the debt in half” or, in another version of that claim, “reduced the debt by $1.7 trillion” during his first two years as president. But he appears to be using the terms “debt” and “deficit” interchangeably even though they refer to different things. The federal deficit is the amount by which the government’s expenses exceed its tax revenues in a given year; the national debt is the accumulated total of all government borrowing that has not been paid back. What Biden ought to claim is that he cut the deficit.
But even this claim would be misleading, because the reduction was driven by the expiration of pandemic-era spending programs, not by any particular act of Biden’s. Any American who listens to Biden on these topics and believes him ends up knowing less accurate information about the issue than when they started.
Biden had every right to object to Georgia’s voting-reform laws, although it is worth noting that under them the state’s early-voting turnout rose considerably in both the primaries and the general election, and a University of Georgia survey found that zero percent of black respondents said their voting experience in Georgia was poor in the 2022 midterm election. Around 73 percent of black voters said it was excellent, equal to the percentage of white voters. But Biden furiously denounced those laws and said they were not merely as bad as those of the Jim Crow era but worse. He labeled them “Jim Crow 2.0” and declared, “It is the most pernicious thing. This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle.”
In the run-up to Hunter Biden’s plea deal with the Department of Justice, President Biden didn’t merely say he believed that his son had not violated the law; he told MSNBC in May, “My son has done nothing wrong.” The president’s son later admitted that he hadn’t paid taxes for two years and that he had lied on a federal form to purchase a firearm.
Biden framed his 2020 campaign as “a battle for the soul of America.” You would think a person so worried about souls would say he has seven grandchildren, not six, instead of instructing his aides to declare that Hunter Biden’s youngest daughter doesn’t exist. There’s ordinary lying, and then there’s the kind of lie where you disavow your own four-year-old granddaughter.
And Biden’s Walter Mitty fabulism isn’t as harmless as his defenders insist. No, he wasn’t arrested in South Africa while attempting to meet Nelson Mandela; Israeli prime minster Golda Meir never asked him to be her liaison between Israel and the Egyptians concerning the Suez Canal; he never hit a 368-foot shot that bounced off the outfield wall in the congressional baseball game; and there’s no evidence that he confronted Vladimir Putin face to face and told the Russian dictator that he didn’t think Putin had a soul. Besides revealing Biden to be an insufferable braggart, these stories offer reason to think Biden cannot see himself accurately or remember his own past clearly. In his stories, he’s always the toughest and smartest guy in the room, bold, brave, strong, the best of the best. Every foe is intimidated, and every ally is starstruck by his genius. It’s a fantasy world, a happy escape from the messy reality before him each day.
If today’s president ignores warnings — say, to keep Bagram Air Base open in Afghanistan instead of closing up shop before everyone is evacuated as the Taliban closes in — and disregards counter-evidence, it reflects his hubris and an unearned faith in his own instincts and judgment. Biden’s worldview is built upon a misremembered happy fog of past victories and everything working out great. Perhaps you can argue that statements like these aren’t conscious, deliberate lies, but a commander in chief who can’t distinguish between fantasy and reality is likely just as dangerous.
That Biden and Trump remain the two men most likely to take the oath of office on January 20, 2025, is a vivid demonstration that the fact-checking gang in the mainstream media — PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, designated reporters at CNN and the Washington Post — have zero impact on the conduct of elected officials. No matter how many times Biden and Trump get called out, they ignore it and keep plowing ahead.
Ultimately, the lack of consequences for the habitual lying — or, on a charitable reading, delusions — of Trump and Biden is the fault of the American electorate. Democrats know that Biden insisted that the tide of migrants at the border was just part of a routine seasonal pattern, that the Afghan army was sufficiently trained and equipped to repel the Taliban, that no serious economist was suggesting that unchecked inflation was on the way, and so on. But they shrug, accept that Biden says a lot of things that turn out to be false, and appear ready to bear the risk of renominating a man who will turn 82 shortly after Election Day. The overwhelming majority of self-identified Republicans think highly of Trump, and around half can’t wait to make him the GOP nominee for the third straight cycle. Not only do voters not mind notorious liars as their presidents, but recent primaries suggest that a lot of voters prefer them.
Our system of government cannot work unless elected officials, the press, candidates for office, and the electorate as a whole agree broadly on at least basic facts. A free society offers a lot of room for debate and there will always be things we cannot be certain of, but many of the facts pertaining to the issues we debate are verifiable. Either there was rampant voter fraud in 2020 or there wasn’t. Either more migrants are attempting to cross our southern border or they aren’t. We may disagree on what to do about the national debt — $32.5 trillion, as of this writing — but discussing it is unproductive if a large chunk of the country thinks it has lately been cut in half.
Life is tough because it requires us to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. We should demand no less of our leaders.
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