It was January 11, 2017, a few days before Donald Trump’s inauguration. Asked at a press conference by CNN correspondent Jim Acosta about his links with Russia, the President-elect of the United States then pointed the finger at him by declaring: “You are fake news”. The expression “fake news”, false information, made its big entry in the American political vocabulary. Four years later, when the country’s voters were called to the polls on Tuesday, November 3 for the US presidential election, she reigns supreme.
The Washington post, one of the most respected American newspapers in the United States, but systematically criticized by the host of the White House, has listed more than 25,000 “lies or misleading allegations” uttered by Donald Trump since he became president. The daily, which employs four people to verify the facts, notes that its Democratic opponent Joe Biden also lies or exaggerates in the campaign, but in proportions much more “normal” for a politician, and that he more easily admits his errors.
Even caught in the act, “he never apologizes”
Trump? Never. “He never apologizes, even when caught in the act of a proven lie […] and he pays no political price for his lies, ”noted Anne Deysine, professor at the University of Paris-Nanterre, in The Conversation this summer. “Like the Tefal pan, it appears to be protected by a protective coating.”
Already in 2011, Donald Trump, then an ordinary citizen, asserted that Barack Obama should not be president because he was not born in the United States, a shameless lie. But even today, 40% of Republicans are convinced that Obama was born in Kenya … Lie, lie, there will always be something left.
False assertions, hoaxes, intox, untruths, in all areas, the 45th President of the United States has erected “alternative facts” into a communication system. No one has forgotten here that the president boasted of having gathered the largest crowd for his inauguration, a fabrication contradicted by all the photos of the day …
An uninterrupted series
The wall built on the southern border that Mexico was going to pay for? Only six kilometers of new construction and Mexico has not paid a peso.
Is he the most popular of the Republican presidents? False, the two Bushes, Reagan, even Nixon, were more popular than him according to the polls.
Has the US economy never been stronger? Certainly, the economy was running at full speed before the Covid-19 pandemic, but in the days of Bill Clinton or Dwight Eisenhower, for example, general indicators were better.
“No other president has done as much for black Americans as I have, except Lincoln perhaps?” An assertion ridiculed by historians …
“Biden will raise everyone’s taxes,” the president likes to repeat. False, Biden will increase those of the upper classes only, according to his program.
Serious consequences for the Covid-19 epidemic
The president’s lies or outrageous statements are repeated in a loop in the echo chamber that exists between the president, the conservative Fox channel and even conspirators, analyzes Anne Deysine. They are conveyed on social networks, so much so that they reach “an indisputable truth status within groups favorable to Trump”.
But it is in the fight against what he calls the “Chinese virus” that Trump’s lies have had disastrous consequences. By concealing the gravity of the Covid-19 epidemic, by contradicting its most pointed experts, by constantly and wrongly promising the imminent arrival of a vaccine, the president must take some responsibility for the catastrophic toll of the pandemic (more than 230,000 deaths to date) in the United States. On Tuesday, the Americans had the opportunity to sanction these lies.
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Original article by : www.leparisien.fr
