SEX, LIES & AUDIOTAPE

BY: Michael Arkin

When President Trump and his unmasked clan charged into the East Room early Wednesday morning, asserting that he had won the election, he added one more falsehood to the pile of 22,000 lies he has told since his inauguration. As of this writing he has been in office for 1,385 days, which equates to nearly 16 falsehoods a day. Depending on the ultimate outcome of the razor thin election margin, we may have to withstand as few as 1264 and as many as 24,592 more Trumpian lies before we see him leave the Oval Office. Time will tell.

While Mr. Trump wouldn’t need a ghostwriter to pen The Art of Deceit, he’s not the first President to bend the truth. That would have been Thomas Jefferson who misled the country about the real purpose of the Lewis & Clark expedition. Contrary to what we learned in the 4th grade, the duo’s 8,000-mile journey wasn’t really about cataloging the flora, fauna and native tribes that inhabited the land acquired as part of the Louisiana Purchase, it was to scope out the far West for acquisition.

In today’s 24/7 news cycle where, thanks to the Internet, everyone is a reporter with the ability to disseminate photos and information to a wide audience, it’s hard to imagine that wheelchair-bound Franklin Delano Roosevelt was able to rely on a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ with the press in order to hide his paralysis from the public. Diagnosed with polio in 1921 at the age of 39, the popular President was rarely seen in his wheelchair and enlisted the Secret Service to help keep his secret. As Editor and Publisher reported in 1936, “If an agent saw a photographer taking a picture of FDR say, getting out of his car, they would seize the camera and tear out the film.”  As written in Time magazine, “The press depicted FDR as someone who had been stricken by polio, but who had triumphed over his affliction.” 

 

With Europe at war with Germany, FDR promised neutrality, something that Americans, still licking their wounds from WWI and the effects of the Great Depression, were desperate to maintain. However, there is support for the theory that his outward appearance of isolationism was nothing more than an act of appeasement to the populace and that his Lend-Lease bill that allowed him to supply war materials to any country deemed vital to the defense of the US, underlined his true intentions. As reported by Kathryn Olmstead in Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, “Perhaps…he (FDR) might even create an incident to force the country into another unwanted war.” Some say that event may have been Pearl Harbor. 

FDR wasn’t the only US President to deceive his way into a war. 1964’s infamous Gulf of Tonkin Incident fabricated a confrontation between North Vietnamese and US ships that resulted in America getting directly involved in the Vietnam War. Despite President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s claims that the aim of the Vietnam War was to secure an independent, non-Communist South Vietnam, The Pentagon Papers later revealed that the underlying justification was to contain China, not assist South Vietnam in its battle against communism. The incident earned LBJ the title as the most consequential presidential liar.

 

While time lends enchantment, and our musings about President John F. Kennedy are wrapped in Camelot-like gossamer, on April 18, 1961, he sent the Soviet Union’s Premiere, Nikita Khrushchev, a letter declaring, “As I have previously stated, and I repeat now, the United States intends no military action in Cuba” despite the fact that just the day before 1400 CIA-trained Cuban exiles landed in what became known as the Bay of Pigs invasion. The botched incursion resulted in the Soviets installing nuclear weapons in Cuba, which, in turn, led to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962.

 

In what the newsreels labeled the greatest spy story of 1960, and what he called his greatest regret, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was forced to confess lying about US-conducted secret reconnaissance missions over Russia. Initially claiming that the aircraft was an unarmed weather research plane, he was forced to eat humble pie when the Russians produced both the shot down pilot and his U-2 spy plane. 

Up until the current administration, Richard M. Nixon was the poster boy for Presidential corruption. In her book, Richard Nixon: The Shaping of his Character, Fawn Brodie quotes the 37th President as telling a friend, “If you can’t lie, you’ll never go anywhere.” Perhaps his greatest lie was his claim “I am not a crook” when professing that he had no involvement in the break-in of Democrat National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Towers. Unfortunately, the automatic voice-activated audio taping system he had installed in the Oval Office proved otherwise and one recording, known as The Smoking Gun Tape, clearly implicated the President in the coverup. Nixon’s refusal to release the subpoenaed tapes led to the infamous Saturday Night Massacre and ultimately, the Supreme Court ordering the release of the tapes. With his Senatorial support eroded, and the threat of impeachment looming, Nixon became the only President to resign his office. 

 

He was not, however, the only President to face impeachment in the House of Representatives. Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump share that dishonor.  Clinton was impeached for lying to investigators about his affair with then 22-year-old White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. Clinton’s defense rested on the controversial claim that oral sex and masturbating do not represent ‘having sexual relations’, which Clinton maintained he never had with Lewinsky, who reportedly performed oral sex on the President and masturbated with a cigar while Clinton watched (allegedly masturbating as well). Supposedly, while those hijinks were occurring inside, Clinton kept Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Army, waiting in the Rose Garden.

 

Why do we expect our Presidents to behave any differently than the politicians they are? Without a king or queen, we Americans venerate our elected officials, and then scorn them when they fly too close to the sun. Writing in The Washington Post, Ronald Steel said, the President is “Keeper of our dreams as well as our needs. No wonder that he soon disappoints and a little later, disillusions us.”

Then we shouldn’t be surprised that President Trump displayed his trademarked lack of empathy when, in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, (which ultimately claimed close to 3,000 lives), he tossed out rolls of paper towels to victims that had gathered in San Juan’s Calvary Chapel in Puerto Rico. In a surreal twist on “Let them eat cake,” he provided the assembled victims with the opportunity to use the towels to dry their tears. 

In her 1967 essay Truth and Politics, Hannah Arendt warned of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth as a necessary ingredient of totalitarian dictatorship. After reading it, one wonders if President Trump, who is rumored to keep a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf on his bedside table, is smart enough to purposely employ these tactics, or is he just such a compulsive liar that he can’t control himself? That’s a question we may want to pose to his niece, Mary Trump.

Even before she was the First Lady, Melania Trump gave us a hint of what was to come when she addressed the 2016 Republican National Convention and blatantly plagiarized Michelle Obama’s speech from the 2008 Democratic National Convention. And how can we ever forget her fashion faux pas when she wore the now infamous ‘I don’t really care, do u?’ jacket to visit the New Hope Children’s Shelter in McCallen, Texas that housed 55 children, including some that had been separated from their parents as a result of her husband’s zero-tolerance policy against immigration?

Pity the people that have to represent them. Was it just four years ago that Press Secretary Sean Spicer stood in front of the Washington Press Corp in an ill-fitting suit and insisted that Trump’s inauguration had “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, in person and around the globe.” He’s also the one who described Trump as “caring and gracious” and when comparing Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, to Adolph Hitler said that even “Hitler didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons” despite the fact that more than 6 million Jews were exterminated with poison gas in Nazi death camps.

Then there’s Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s second Press Secretary, who vowed that he never “promoted or encouraged violence” even though in numerous campaign rallies, he told supporters, “If you see someone getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, will you?”

 

Let’s not forget Kellyanne Conway, Counselor to the President who served as his final campaign manager in the 2016 election. The real-life doppelganger of Waylon Flowers’ Madame, Conway is the author of the term “alternative facts”. This from the woman who maintained that people could be surveilled through their microwave ovens

The current Press Secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, told her first lie on her first day on the job when she promised, “I will never lie to you.” It’s been downhill from there. She went on to say that the Mueller report was a “complete exoneration of the President,” and that the US healthcare system was prepared for the Coronavirus pandemic. But perhaps her most despicable untruth was in supporting Trump’s claim that MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough had a person murdered.

.All of this makes me curious to see how she will spin the President’s wee small hours of the morning acceptance speech. Standing in front of a phalanx of American flags, he claimed, “Frankly, we did win this election” despite the fact that many states were still counting the votes some 36 hours later. After trashing the democrats and claiming that this was fraud being perpetrated against the country, he went on to say, “To me this is a very sad moment and we will win this.” Hopefully, that will be his biggest lie of all.