Has truth vanished completely from public life? Is morality and common decency passé? Are we still able to demand integrity and honesty from our leaders?
Putin lies. “Russia will not invade Ukraine;” “We have no plans to invade Ukraine.” The atrocities and war crimes in Bucha and other cities near Kyiv were “committed by Ukrainians.” They were “staged by Ukraine.” Alexei Navalny poisoned himself and his photographs of a huge presidential mansion near Sochi are “fake news.”
Donald J. Trump Sr. lies. “I won the 2020 election.” “I never said” the very words that were frequently captured on tape. I “never overvalued” my properties or falsified requests for bank loans - referring to golf courses across the world or the Seven Springs Estate in Bedford, NY, that is central to New York Attorney General Letitia James’s investigation of Trump’s many frauds. “I never cheated anyone,” is a constant lie by our former president and mega-exaggerator. On Dec. 14, 2017, the New York Times published a long article listing in exquisite detail each of Trump’s lies that year. It went on at length and his lies numbered for that year alone (mine may be an undercount) 185 outright lies in just 2017. Those lies were documented and verified. What about the rest, and his lifetime of grifting, cheating, defrauding, and being immoral and amoral? When he egged on the rabble at his Jan. 6, 2021 rally, and then lied and continues to lie about what he said and what he meant, Trump remains in character. Neither Trump nor Putin has as yet revealed exactly what holds them together, but falsifying everything that moves could be at least one.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who wants to become Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s successor as Speaker of the House of Representatives, lies blatantly despite tapes with his words distinctly saying that Trump was “responsible” for the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6. “I never said what I said” he flaunts.
“This time, the truth Mr. McCarthy told was that Mr. Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6 had been ‘atrocious and totally wrong’ and that he planned to seek the outgoing president’s resignation. “The lie Mr. McCarthy told was that he had said no such thing and that The New York Times had made it up, a statement that was quickly refuted by his taped voice telling Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, exactly what The Times said he had said.” (New York Times, Sunday)
Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Sunday that McCarthy was “a liar and a traitor.” Moreover, “That is really the illness that pervades the Republican leadership right now….Shame on Kevin McCarthy.” (Boston Globe, Monday)
Warren might also have included her colleague, too. Sen. Mitchell McConnell, who wants to reclaim his leadership of the U. S. Senate, denies having echoed McCarthy and – in a moment of rare honesty – says what most readers of this Newsletter will acknowledge -- that Trump is (to quote the modest candor of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg) “a con man” with no pretensions of honest dealing or integrity.
Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff, lies. The Congressional Jan. 6 Committee is exposing the more dangerous of his many prevarications about what led up to and prompted the mayhem on Jan. 6. Rep. Marjorie Greene Taylor, a Republican, says “I don’t recall” when asked whether or not she lied in a promiscuous fashion regarding storming the Capitol.
Rep. Madison Cawthorn, a Republican, tried to deny having ever dressed in women’s clothes, photographs to the contrary. Eric Greitens, a Republican candidate for the U. S. Senate in Missouri, denies abusing his wife and his mistress, despite abundant on- the-record evidence.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson lies almost as much as Trump – about drinking parties during Covid-19 lockdowns, about his various wives and children, about his policy shifts, about sending migrants to Rwanda, and about Brexit. For him, honesty is distant and deception constant.
Former South African President Jacob Zuma denies stealing money from the public by taking bribes in the 1990s from Swedish and French suppliers of armaments, naval vessels, and aircraft. He says that his retirement mansion built with official funds in KwaZulu-Natal included swimming pools and other luxury features for “security” reasons. He asserts that no favors were granted to the three Gupta brothers who fled to Dubai after evidence of elaborately arranged mutual “state capture” thefts were revealed. Over the weekend, insider testimony showed how Zuma had worked directly with Bain & Co.’s South African branch to strip South Africa’s Revenue Authority of its ability to curb grand corruption, especially his own.
The late Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and his successor, current Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa, both lied about atrocities committed against the Ndebele people of their country in 1983-1984, about misappropriating the spoils of the invasion of the southern Democratic Republic of Congo in 1997-1998, about taking revenue from diamond mines and stuffing millions into their own (and other) personal pockets, and about the assassination of rivals like Generals Josiah Tongogara and Solomon Mujuru, and the possible elimination of many others, including Herbert Chitepo.
Deceit is everywhere. Publics are purposely misled. Denials of obvious mistruths are labeled fake news. But what is novel in the early years of the third decade of the twenty-first century is how leaders and politicians everywhere lie through their teeth and expect to pay few political consequences. Nor do they appear to have moral qualms. Honesty is an endangered commodity. And that is a wild understatement.
To quote one who lied to save his political and marital future, and was found out: “’It’s a tragic indictment of the political process these days — and the Republican Party of late — that truth doesn’t matter, words don’t matter, everybody can be elastic in areas that were once viewed as concrete,’ said Mark Sanford, a former Republican governor of South Carolina who lied to the public about his whereabouts when he was pursuing an extramarital affair in South America and was censured by the State House of Representatives. ‘You cross lines now, and there are no longer consequences.’” ( New York Times, Sunday)
President Biden never lies, although he has been known over the years to exaggerate and, doubtlessly, to mislead various constituencies. Pelosi and Senate leader Charles Schumer have, I presume, also slid over the absolute unvarnished truth on occasion. But they would long ago have been discovered and pilloried if they had been serial false tellers like Trump, McCarthy, McConnell, and a slew of other Republican office holders.
Note, too, that President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has achieved charismatic leadership stardom (this Conflict Mitigation Newsletter, #9 - “Strong Leadership Distinguishes Good and Evil” March 16, 2022 -- https://robertirotberg.substack.com/p/9-strong-leadership-distinguishes?r=1czwuu&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web) because he is truthful, refrains even from sugarcoating Ukraine’s existential crisis, and demonstrates authenticity. That means that he can be trusted as a truth teller and someone in whom the Ukrainian public can believe, and for which, and for his expressed ideals, they can fight.
In other words, Zelensky has enhanced his legitimacy in ways that liars like Trump, McCarthy, and McConnell have forfeited. What Sanford (and thousands of others) bemoans is our loss of Truth in global as well as American public life. As Army counsel Joseph Welch burst out to the other baleful McCarthy, Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, in the Army-Senate hearings in 1954, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no decency?” (To be clear, this strong condemnation often appears as: “Have you no shame, sir, at long last? Have you no shame?")
Sen. McCarthy’s exposure as a malignant bully before the nation (television, then relatively novel, displayed every moment of the hearings) provided a signal prelude to the formal vote of censure by the Senate a few months later. “That signaled the beginning of the end of his personal reign of terror on the national scene.” (Washington Post, May 24, 1987) Can we do the same now for the new pernicious liars like McCarthy, McConnell, Taylor, Cawthorn, and many others – even Trump?
It is very difficult to know how and whether “truth” will win, but the existential struggle in Ukraine is about honesty defeating deceit, just as it is on the American federal political playing fields of persistent prevarication.
To add to your list of mendacious leaders, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) uttered 76,544 untruths* in 820 morning press conferences between December 3, 2018 and March 31, 2022, according to the political consultancy SPIN (http://www.spintcp.com/conferenciapresidente/infografia-72/). There have been 15 more press conferences since then. If the average of 93 holds for this period (in fact, the average has risen over time), it would increase the number by 1,395.
By the way, the topic AMLO brings up most often (6,172 times as of February 15, 2022) is corruption (http://www.spintcp.com/conferenciapresidente/infografia-69/), which is consistent with his strong anti-corruption campaign platform. Perhaps the most egregious of his lies, echoing Bolsonaro's claim for Brazil five months previously, was pronounced on March 11, 2021: "There is no more corruption [in Mexico]" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dP6uHeyAiY).
* In early counts the "untruths" were broken down into categories: promises, commitments, non-falsifiable, and false. Of these, approximately 1/7 were "false" as of July 1, 2019 (http://www.spintcp.com/conferenciapresidente/infografia-6/). Using 1/7 to estimate the number of outright lies, we can calculate nearly 11,000 falsehoods through March 11, 2022, an average of 13 per press conference.