Trump’s lies are finally coming home to roost
One effective way to spot a lie is to track its progress over time. Time is not kind to most lies. For instance, time caught up with the lies told by the Catholic Church concerning the scientific discoveries of Galileo Galilei. Despite endless delusional promises that “time will tell,” time has not exonerated prominent conspiracy theories such as the Kennedy assassination theories or the moon hoax nonsense or the notion that UFOs are “really” little green men from neighbouring star systems. In short, lies do not age well. That’s a good thing. They shouldn’t.
Donald Trump’s lies are a case in point. They especially do not age well. As time goes by Trump looks more and more like a liar, more and more like a thief, more and more like a rapist and more and more like a guilty criminal. The more lies he tells the worse this perception becomes.
One thing Donald Trump doesn’t seem to understand is that it’s his very own mouth that is burying him. Every public utterance he makes, no matter the context, can and will be used against him in a court of law. Whatever criminal trials come his way the probability is that he will choose to never testify. Or his lawyers will choose it for him and talk him out of testifying. Yet he already has testified anyway in the form of numerous rallies, interviews, social media posts and casual recorded public utterances that he has made and will continue to make in the court of public opinion. And those utterances are available to use in a court of law for the prosecution of any criminal case brought against Trump at any time they want. And they will.
For example, one of the peculiar lies that have come from Trump is that he can declassify classified documents with his mind. That lie has not aged well. First, because we know it’s not true. No one, not even a president of the United States, can declassify anything with their mind.
There is a specific bureaucratic process involved in document declassification, created in order to ensure that such documents aren’t declassified too early, that field personnel aren’t inadvertently put in danger or that ongoing operations aren’t compromised. There’s a reason why this process is in place, and the outcome of any request to declassify a document isn’t always a declassified document. Sometimes the request is denied, for reasons just stated.
No one, for example, is worried about the once top secret plans of General Patton from the Battle of the Bulge. If by some oversight it turned out that they still retained their top secret classification, someone, a historian for example, might wish to change that so they could use those plans in a book on the battle’s history. So not only is the declassification process not as easy as Trump proclaims, there’s a reason why it isn’t. If any president thought they could declassify documents at any time without thought and without reason, lives would be put in constant danger. It’s just absurd to suggest otherwise.
But suggest it he did, and now that lie is ageing badly indeed, by the recent revelation of a tape where Trump (according to people who have heard it) is apparently admitting that a document he possesses hasn’t been declassified. Why not, can’t he do it with his mind? Apparently not, and what’s more, apparently Trump revealed that he knows this.
Trump believing that he could declassify documents with his mind could have helped his case somewhat had it been true. It would have made Trump look like an incompetent fool, to be sure, but in order to keep him out of jail it’s a proposition that Trump’s lawyers might have mooted on his behalf for his defence. While it’s true that ignorance of a crime is no excuse, a crime is regarded as somewhat less criminal if the perpetrator honestly didn’t know it’s a crime.
But if you did know it’s a crime and you pretended it wasn’t, you’d better hope that evidence doesn’t come out later that you jolly well did know it’s a crime. That makes the crime itself in fact far worse. That makes your lie look like an attempt to obstruct justice.
I love the British term for obstruction of justice. They call it “perverting the course of justice.” That seems an even more apt expression to describe Trump. He’s a man who would pervert the course of justice. It would be a perfect poetic retribution on a man who spent his entire presidency perverting the course of justice with tens of thousands of lies that he should be sent to prison for life for those very lies and those very perversions. May justice finally and at long last make it so. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.