Contest Announcement: Is Donald Trump the Biggest Liar Ever?
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This could be fun! Let’s make a game of it. I believe Donald Trump has told more documented lies than any human being ever. I could be wrong about this. One of the big problems with our politics is that people are unwilling to learn they are wrong and admit it. So I’m going to challenge anyone who wants to participate: Show me I’m wrong. Not only will I admit it, I will pay you for teaching me. I will send you a free, signed copy of one of my novels and a $25 Visa gift card (in the hopes that you’ll like my book and choose to use the gift card to buy another from your locally owned independent bookstore 😁). I’m paying you to prove me wrong.
Rules: Be the first to provide me with the name of someone who has told more lies than Donald Trump, and provide a link to documentation that this individual has told more than 20,000 lies, and you win. I’ll DM you to get the address where you want me to send your book and Visa Gift Card. It’s that easy.
But! (And this is on your honor) if you can’t think of anyone, spread the word about this contest. Share the post or tweet or link to the blog. Ask your friends. If you are a Trump supporter, try to get help from other Trump supporters. If you have a celebrity you know who might want to share this and even sweeten the pot with a prize of their own, ask them to participate. If you know someone in the media, ask them to cover the story of the contest. Because this is more than a game. This matters.
Here’s the thing: I have asked Trump supporters this question before. Can they name me anyone, not just a President or a politician by ANYONE, who has ever told as many documented lies as Donald Trump. Here’s what I get back:
Absurd guesses based on partisanship rather than evidence. “Obama!” “Clinton!” Not even close, and they can’t ever find any documentation for those claims.
Or both-sides-ism. “All politicians lie.” Perhaps, but that’s as logical as answering “What does 2+2=?” with “All math questions have answers.” Trivially true but not going to get you far in a math class.
Or what-about-ism. “What about Benghazi?” Again, trying to shift the question to “What is the most significant lie?” and not even doing a very good job of it.
Here’s what I never get:
A name and evidence to support the claim. Not once. Not yet.
I reached out to a Harvard Ph.D. expert on lying, Dr. Bella DePaulo, to see if she could think of any documented cases that would top Trump. I was worried there might be some famous case of a compulsive liar who had been studied and all his/her lies tallied up by a psychologist. (Dr. DePaulo’s work on Trump has focused not on the quantity of his lies, but on their nature. She’s found he is an exception in another way. Not only does he lie more than anybody, but his lies are exceptionally self-serving and cruel.)
She couldn’t think of anyone who beat him in sheer numbers off the top of her head, either. “I don't know of anyone, but it is possible that such people exist and someone else could point to the evidence,” she said. So let’s find out! Anybody got a name and a citation?
Here’s why this matters: If someone lies to you, they are doing something wrong. We have a basic moral framework, supported by every religion and moral schema, that dictates that people should tell the truth. We make exceptions for “little white lies,” those expressions of polite falsehood that serve as social lubricant. But we all understand that falsehoods undermine relationships, and that too many undermine society itself. If everyone were to lie like Donald Trump, verbal communication itself would simply break down. We’d be living in caves and grunting at one another in a generation or two. We must believe that the people with whom we are communicating are at least making an effort to communicate honestly. If they aren’t, they are harming us. But here’s the thing: If they are harming our relationship by being deceitful, and if we know that, and if we encourage them to continue, we are participating in the harm. And if we know better than to harm ourselves (and that’s a logical leap, I know, but let’s stipulate it), and we continue to do it, we are fools. That’s why one of the myriad ways we describe lies (and for a great read on those, check out Bullshit: A Lexicon by Mark Peters) is to say someone has “made a fool” of you. So as people are making their final voting decisions, and as the rest of us are trying to figure out how to feel about people who support Donald Trump, here’s something we should all be able to agree on: If, as I suspect, Donald Trump has told more lies to the American people than any person ever, and if someone is aware of this contest and follows the results, and if they still decide to vote for Donald Trump, they are a fool. That’s not mean to say. It’s not uncivil. It’s something they are telling you about themselves. If they know about this contest and vote for Trump, they are saying, “I know he makes a fool of me. And I am okay with that because X, Y, Z.” And they may have reasons, even legitimate ones. They aren’t irredeemable or unworthy of engaging in community in the future. They aren’t necessarily an evil person; that’s a separate debate. But they are a fool, self-evidently, almost tautologically.
And I think that can help us going forward. If we can at least understand that Trump voters are fools, while we can still live together and build a society together, we can all make an informed decision not to allow those people to hold the kinds of positions where their foolishness will continue to cause harm. For example, I would be hard-pressed to imagine a circumstance where I would ever vote for someone I knew supported Trump, and that’s not because I want to punish them for the harm their vote caused, but because I wouldn’t be able to trust them to make good decisions in the future knowing they were fully aware that Trump lied to them more than anyone else and they chose to believe him anyway. What kind of decisions would that person make in a position of power? It’s reasonable to assume they would make foolish ones. Because they have told us they are a fool. (If they were running against someone who I knew would cause terrible harm, I’d certainly consider it. I’m all for strategic voting to produce the best possible outcome. But that’s a separate debate.)
I am excited to see what someone out there can find, or to see how broadly we can spread the word if no alternative answer can be found.
And please, think carefully about this question when deciding how to vote and how to live with your neighbors after the election. I suspect most people have made up their minds at this point, but regardless, we still have to learn to live with one another on November 4th. Maybe that will be in a country dominated by fools. Maybe it will be in a country where the majority of us have to figure out how to minimize the harm caused by a sizable number of fools. Or maybe it’s just a country where one guy has been foolish and will be forced to admit it and pay somebody. Let’s figure that out together, shall we?