By Mike Weland
Most people I know will not long tolerate a liar, yet there are millions today who rally to protect and defend the greatest and most brazen liar of our time. It’s not all that rare for charismatic liars to gain the undue trust of those inclined to believe what they are hoping to hear. Think Jim Jones, David Koresh, Charles Manson. What is rare, but not unheard of, are inveterate liars capable of putting a whole nation in peril.
“So what?” you are saying. What about the other side? They lie, too! They’re all liars! They wouldn’t go into politics if they weren’t liars … Why not listen to the liar who tells it like it is? Like I’ve always believed it to be?”
I’ll take those sentiments a step further — all of us lie, not just the politicians. By the time we learn to speak in sentences, we’re skilled liars. But most of us learn early on that lying is wrong. Most of us feel guilt when telling a lie, even such a lie as telling a child not yet able to understand that her beloved grandmother, dying in a hospital, will be okay. For the many, telling a lie, even those silly slip of the tongue wrong answer lies, actually hurts.
But there are those who feel no such guilt. Caught red-handed in a bald faced lie, they feel no shame, only chagrin that someone had the temerity to disbelieve. Such a liar can assuage such an accusation by telling an even bigger lie, or by disparaging the character of the truth-teller … almost always by telling more lies.
This sort of liar never takes responsibility for the lies or the inherent damage that invariably results. Indeed, they blame those hurt by their lies, make themselves the victims of the truthtellers.
Joseph McCarthy was one of those rare liars who managed to imperil a nation, which he did while serving as a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin for a decade from 1947 to 1957. It was for him the word McCarthyism was coined, defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “The political practice of publicizing accusations of disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence; and the use of methods of investigation and accusation regarded as unfair, in order to suppress opposition.”
For ten years McCarthy spread terror and unjustly ruined institutions, careers and lives just by pointing and uttering three dread syllables: comm-u-nist.
It was during one of many of McCarthy’s sham hearings to reveal communists in our midst that six simple words shook the American people awake and brought about McCarthy’s figurative and literal demise. At a hearing investigating the U.S. Army for communist influences, McCarthy accused a young Army lawyer of being a communist.
Hearing enough, Army Chief Council Joseph Nye Welch on June 9, 1954, rose before the cameras of the nation interceded.
“Have you no sense of decency?” he asked bluntly. And the American people finally saw McCarthy for who and what he truly was, a blustering bully willing to lie and destroy the lives of others to assuage his ego. On December 2, 1954, the U.S. Senate voted to condemn McCarthy. No longer wielding power or influence, he remained in the Senate but became addicted to morphine and essentially began drinking himself to death, dying at age 48 on May 2, 1957.
And now Donald J. Trump, the Lyin’ King of American Presidents, who averaged 39 false or misleading claims a day in his final year as president, 30,573 documented lies in his four-year term, wants another chance. A chance to convince those who didn’t buy his lies the first time around, who weren’t fooled into thinking he did what he said he’d do simply because he said he did.
Some were innocuous yet inane, such as his insistence on the “yuge” size of his inaugural crowd. Some are hurtful, designed to wrongly belittle or diminish his enemies, his rivals, friends who didn’t genuflect with sufficient obeisance.
But many of his lies have caused serious harm that may well last for decades; that media and Democrats are enemies of the state, that our dusky immigrants are poisoning the blood of the American people, that elections are increasingly corrupt, that there is truth to the idea of supremacy, validity to the idea that ours is a nation that should impose the very thing those who fled to these shores sought to escape — a national religion imposed — the antithesis of freedom, of liberty.
One truth about liars of the caliber of Trump … they can’t lie when they speak of their own grandiosity. When Trump boasts that he will be your retribution, he has shown that he means it. When he speaks of using the Justice Department to persecute his enemies, he means it. When he speaks of dismantling the Selective Service System and replacing thousands of federal civil servants with ardent Trump supporters, he means it. When he speaks of doing away with the constitution, he means it. When he seeks and obtains from the Supreme Court he corrupted an exemption from criminal prosecution for the one person in our nation who should evince a higher standard, he means to use it, thereby upending the rule of law
Even though he denies being associated with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a blue print to destroy democracy and anoint Trump king, he believes it.
No matter how great or high-minded the words, nothing of substance, nothing good, has ever been built on a foundation of lies. Despite the fawning adoration and fond reminiscences of those who believe the lies, an objective analysis of Trump’s dearth of actual achievement during his four years in office will attest to that statement.
One thing for Trump, though — he is true to form. Coming down the final stretch of his third presidential campaign, his lies are getting more egregious, his name calling meaner and more blatant. More people are letting a liar tell them what to think rather than think for themselves.
In a Republic, voters play a vital role, casting their ballot for the individual they trust will best represent them in doing the important work of government in offices of public trust, the highest of which in our nation is the presidency. Donald Trump has proven over and again by his words and actions that he is not worthy of this nation’s trust.
On January 6, 2021, he became the only U.S. President to blatantly betray the trust of a nation he took a vow to serve, a constitution he swore to uphold and defend. That he is a party’s nominee for one more shot at destroying a government more fair and equitable and with more hope than any before it on earth is a sure sign that now … now … is the time for all among us, regardless of party, who believe the founding principles of our constitution that all men are created equal, that all men have rights and that all men are equal under the law, to stand and cast our vote as one to make Kamala Harris the next president.
There is no need to Make America Great Again, she is far greater than any small-minded self-centered lifelong loser with daddy issues can fathom. Instead, we must keep her great and strive ever to make her more perfect.