TIO Public Square
The Meaning of Truth has Changed…And that’s No Lie
by Robert P. Sellers
I am old enough to have heard the story in elementary school about young George Washington cutting down his father’s cherry tree, and then declaring he could not tell a lie, so his father – celebrating his son’s honesty – did not punish him. A video on the History Channel, commenting on this story, explains that little is known about Washington’s childhood, except for this one beloved incident. According to the narrative, George received a hatchet as a gift when he was perhaps six years old, and his favorite pastime became chopping everything in sight, including his father’s favorite cherry tree.
Because the elder Washington had taught his son the value of truth-telling, he embraced and forgave the boy when George admitted his wrongdoing. The story, however, is legend and was invented by Parson Weems, an itinerant preacher. In 1809, a decade after President Washington’s death, Weems published this tale in a new edition of his book, Life of George Washington the Great. While there is no evidence that this account is true, parents and teachers have retold it for generations, wanting to inspire children to develop honesty as a virtue, modeled after the character of our country’s founding leader.
We have traveled a very long way from 1809 to 2024, from the first president fictitiously commemorated for his honesty to the 45th president notoriously documented as blatantly and excessively dishonest.
Donald Trump is infamously known as a liar. His “false or misleading claims total 30,507” during the four years of his presidency, says the fact checker team of The Washington Post, “Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30507 over 4 years.” In 2017, barely a year into Trump’s term in office, the social justice Christian Jim Wallis, president and founder of Sojourners, wrote about Trump’s lies in Faith and Resistance in the Age of Trump: “[C]onfronting falsehoods with the truth is absolutely crucial, and will have to be done by all of us…. So it’s time for us all to stop calling the presidency of Donald Trump “unprecedented.” Dangerous is the proper word.”
Kelly Brown Douglas, Distinguished Professor of Religion at Goucher College and Canon Theologian at Washington National Cathedral, asks in her article for Faith and Resistance in the Age of Trump:
How did it happen? How has a man whose campaign was filled with racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic vitriol and who mounted a racialized ‘birther’ campaign against the nation’s first African American president, while promising ‘Law and Order’/ Wall Building protectionist policies – how has this man been elected president in a country that proclaims ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ for all?
Granted, politicians will stretch the truth to gain favor and votes. Newswriter Jude Sherrin explains that, without contradiction, recent presidents like Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bush 1 and 2, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have been guilty of this practice – and Joe Biden can be added to the list. But Trump’s massive catalog of lies stands alone in American history. Moreover, his three-year repeated recitation of the Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election has duped millions of American voters.
Joseph Heller, in his 1961 novel Catch 22, was more prescient than he realized when he wrote:
It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.
Retired U.S. Marine Corps General John Kelly, after serving our country more than four decades in the military, served as White House Chief of Staff for President Trump from 2017 to 2019. During those years, he became increasingly disillusioned with Trump’s character and leadership. For a 2020 CNN television special titled “The Insiders: A Warning from former Trump Officials,” Kelly said: “The [depth] of his dishonesty is just astounding to me. The dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship, [is] more pathetic than anything else. He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.”
Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed and Wikipedia
It is fair to say that our ancestors who talked about George Washington’s unwavering commitment to the truth and our children today who recognize Donald Trump’s cavalier disregard for the truth reveal differences other than the passage of time. Even though a side-by-side comparison of these two presidents is a fiction that may only have occurred in the 45th President’s mind, it is ironic, for me, to imagine Washington saying “I cannot tell a lie” and Trump admitting “I cannot tell the truth.”
Yet, does Donald Trump stand alone in his denial and distortion of the truth in the public square? Not at all. A NY Times best-selling author, Robert Draper, published an article for The Atlantic titled “A political party unhinged from the truth.” The piece, adapted from Draper’s 2022 book, Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost its Mind, tells of his repeated encounters with supporters of the new GOP. Draper reports: They “could not conceive of Trump’s adversaries possessing human attributes. Instead, they viewed Democrats, government bureaucrats, and members of the media … as any combination of Communists, traitors, swamp creatures, and human scum.” Convinced and compelled by Trump’s litany of lies, they believed that
the hallucinatory claim that a grand if largely unnamed conspiracy managed to snatch victory away from Trump and hand it to Joe Biden is not a trivial, stand-alone falsehood. Instead, it has become as central to the MAGA belief system as the crucifixion of Jesus is to Christianity. It affirms the martyrdom of their revered leader as well as the incorrigibility of his persecutors. Furthermore, it encourages the belief that the former president’s imagined adversaries across the globe have colluded with domestic malefactors to undermine all manner of American liberties. In these fevered scenarios, Venezuela and South Korea have corrupted our electoral ballots, China has implanted COVID vaccines with mind-control devices, and liberal Jewish billionaires like George Soros have underwritten acts of domestic terrorism.
The lies Trump has so continuously told have given his admirers and followers permission to lie. People who likely grew up valuing truth-telling have relished the freedom they now feel to say anything and everything that comes to mind, believing that by repeatedly uttering falsehoods, no matter how outrageous, their lies somehow become the truth.
Again, I am not suggesting that there are no Democrats or Independents who have believed and spread lies or unjustly denigrated their political opponents. Instead, the point is the obvious fact that in our rancorously divided nation, veracity has been a frequent victim.
Have Americans simply lost their respect for the truth? Or, has the meaning of truth changed, as it has morphed into “alternative facts,” as designated by Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway?
Photo: Digital Notebook
In 2005, comedian, writer and political satirist Stephen Colbert hosted a new television show, “The Colbert Report.” In the first episode of that award-winning, 11 season entertainment phenomenon, Colbert introduced a word he had made up, “truthiness.” He explained: “Truthiness is ‘what I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.’ It's not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There's not only an emotional quality, but there's a selfish quality.” Truthiness, then, has no reliance upon what the facts can support.
In today’s America, lies, conspiracy theories, alternative facts, and truthiness often dominate the media. These duplicitous attacks on the truth can be further enhanced now by artificial intelligence. It is sometimes difficult, therefore, to discern what is actually true but that is what we must do. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham – in The Soul of America: The Battle for our Better Angels – challenges his readers to learn from the lessons of the past and lean into the future with hope and conviction. He writes:
History – and that is all we have to go on – suggests that a president’s vices and his virtues matter enormously, for politics is a human, not a clinical, undertaking. So, too, do the vices and virtues of the people at large, for leadership in the art of the possible, and possibility is determined by whether generosity can triumph over selfishness in the American soul.
If history has taught us anything – not only in fables like the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, but also through the failures and victories of our nation, its leaders and people – it is that truth is a virtue that cannot, should not, must not, be sacrificed on the altar of expediency and success. The meaning of truth in the public square has radically changed, and if the soul of America is to be saved, we must identify and reject lies and work together to reclaim the best angels of our beloved nation.
An ancient prayer by an unknown writer expresses our collective need so well:
From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth.
From the laziness that is content with half-truths,
From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth,
O God of Truth, deliver us.
Header Photo: Unsplash