Deliberate lies and ingenuous 'truths' from America's President: which are more disturbing?

When it comes to Donald Trump, there are lies and there is ignorance, with the possibility that the one fuels the other.

In the President’s first term in office, The Washington Post racked up a staggering 30,573 inaccuracies designed to support his agenda.

But since he took office on January 20, the President has also insisted on various ideas driven by a simple gap in his knowledge.

First off, there was an attack on Spain for its “very low” contribution to NATO defense spending. “They’re a BRICS nation, Spain. You know what a BRICS nation is? You’ll figure it out,” he said to a reporter in the Oval Office, AP reports.

Spain is in the EU and not a member of BRICS which consists of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates.

No matter. BRICS nations – Spain included – would soon be looking at “at least 100 percent tariff on the business they do with the United States.”

Revealing a simplistic grasp of human biology, Trump announced during his inauguration that from now on, the “official policy of the United States government” will be that there are just “two genders” – wiping out the identity of 1.6 million trans and non-binary Americans.

But, according to the journal Scientific American, this is not a biological reality as “ova don’t make a woman and sperm don’t make a man.”

The journal cites a group of biologists who summed it up: “Reliance on strict binary categories of sex fails to accurately capture the diverse and nuanced nature of sex.”

Hopping next to the US takeover of the Panama Canal, Trump claimed that the US had every right to it as it had “lost 38,000 lives in the building” of it.

This figure is way off, according to RTE news. Trump has simply added the 6,000 mainly Caribbean workers during the 1904-1914 US project with the 25,000 lives lost when the French tried and failed to build it in the 1880s.

Numbers appear to be something of a challenge for the new President who was quick to mention his plans for a $500 billion AI Stargate project, which Trump’s wingman Elon Musk was equally prompt in discrediting, CNN reports.

“They don’t actually have the money,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X. “SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority.”

Trump has also been blindsided by a question on the irreversible blanket pardons he issued to Capitol rioters the day of his inauguration.

Asked by NBC News why he had pardoned D.J. Rodriguez, who attacked a police officer with a stun gun at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, for which he got 12 years, Trump asked: “Was it a pardon?” He then made a futile promise to look into it.

The LA wildfires are another area where Trump has shown his ignorance. According to the New York Magazine, the President has long insisted, as he did in a recent interview on Fox News with Sean Hannity, that California is failing to rake its forest floors.

In fact, much of what has gone up in smoke, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, has not been forest but “grasslands and oak-studded hillsides.”

It is also predominantly private land which could not be easily accessed by those hired to carry out the “raking”.

Confusion over the H-1B and H-2B migrant visa programs has been coupled with a jab at Joe Biden for not securing the release of the Israeli hostages sooner in its conflict with Gaza.

Biden, he said, should have done it “a year and a half, two years ago” despite the fact there were no hostages taken by Hamas at that particular time, The Washington Post reports.

Lies are one thing, but as Time magazine’s former editor in chief Nancy Gibbs says, “The “truths” he tells frighten me more. These are the things he clearly believes to be true despite all evidence to the contrary.”

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