LYING IN STATE

All presidents lie—but some much more bigly than others.

When Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark out, writes Nation columnist and author Alterman, he told the new nation a white lie: The pathfinders were supposedly exploring the Mississippi River, a story that, Jefferson wrote, “masks sufficiently the real destination”—namely, the Pacific Ocean. Why would he lie about such a thing? Perhaps to disguise his intentions from prying enemies or perhaps just for the joy of it. Just so, by Alterman’s insightful account, Lyndon Johnson lied about nearly anything he could, though one of his biggest lies—concerning the Gulf of Tonkin incident—was based on such faulty information that he might not have known it was a lie. A Mexican invasion of the U.S., a promise not to raise taxes, weapons of mass destruction, oral sex in the Oval Office—presidents tell lies for manifold reasons, sometimes in the interest of national security, sometimes because the lie is the common coin of politics. There are exceptions. Even though “Barack Obama was not perfectly honest with the American people,” he seems to have corrected course once a misstatement or overstatement was brought to his attention; investigators discovered only six “outright falsehoods” in his entire second term. All this brings us, of course, to the undisputed king of presidential fabulists, Donald Trump, who lies as if lies were mother’s milk and who would confuse us were he ever to tell the truth. Alterman’s merry inventory—which includes detailed breakdowns of many of the 10,000 lies calculated to have come from Trump’s mouth between January 2017 and September 2019—is damning, just as much as is a critical moment at the end of the narrative, when MSNBC anchor Nichole Wallace finally closed a report by saying, “But the president isn’t telling the truth.”

For followers of politics and its practitioners, a capable, readable history of a mendacious tradition.