The United States of America deserves to have a president who tells the truth.
The fact that we feel compelled to make this observation, so early in the new presidency of Donald Trump, suggests that the country is in for a long and miserable four years. Trump and his spokesman, Sean Spicer, need to start telling the truth.
Trump’s gut reliance on making claims that were demonstrably untrue worked fabulously for him on the campaign trail. He eviscerated opponents and knocked back investigative news stories with disturbing frequency and success. His doing so was one of the many reasons we could not and did not support his campaign.
But if he is to lead the country with an ambitious agenda to reverse the course of the Obama presidency, and the resulting congressional gridlock so hated across the land, then the new president needs to have the trustworthiness and transparency that will allow him to develop some level of bipartisan support.
Any rational person would expect that if you succeeded in your presidential campaign in part by calling your opponent Lying Hillary, you would seek, as president, to avoid such a moniker.
But here we are. Lying Trump can’t seem to get his mind around the fact that his inauguration wasn’t as big a hit, in terms of participation and viewership, as his predecessor’s. What struck us as the routine kind of spat one might expect between the local paper and a small-town mayor somehow became a presidential crisis in the opening week of his occupancy of the White House. We sought to avoid getting pulled into commenting on that controversy, choosing instead to look the other way and give the newcomer a bit of room.
But now Trump, as president, has doubled down on his insistence that he lost the popular vote because as many as 5 million people living in the country illegally cast votes. All 50 states have certified their elections without reporting such fraud. To be the president of all people, and to give what must have been lip service to the idea that patriotism has no room for prejudice, as he did in his inaugural promise, means putting aside these divisive myths.
Perhaps worse, Spicer justified the federal hiring freeze Trump ordered with the false assertion that it was to curb “dramatic expansion of the federal workforce in recent years.” We could have praised the freeze as a smart first step for Trump to get a handle on the vast bureaucracy he now oversees; instead we find ourselves informing Spicer that the federal workforce has wavered around 2 million since the 1950s.
The president of the United States needs to demand of himself and of his staff that comments presented to the American people can be trusted and supported by legitimate — and not “alternative” — facts.
Without that basic level of trust, the very functioning of our federal government and our nation will be at risk.
We hoped that we saw some sincerity in his inaugural promise that he would strive to serve and empower all Americans. But his actions betray a terrible failing, a deep character flaw within the new president that cannot be excused as campaign bluster.
Americans won’t be led by a man who works through manipulation and falsehood.
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