The Pinocchio Presidency

Leavitt is leaving as the lies start falling on deaf ears

Credit: Getty Images

The news that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is stepping down from her post got us thinking about her tenure and, more importantly, the tenor of her tenure. The word duplicitous comes to mind.

Does this president even need a press secretary? It seems to be a position corporate America would call redundant. The president’s mobile phone and social media feed are where almost all “information” is conveyed. They are basically propaganda platforms. Trump has few policy positions, only staffers left to boost the lies from his latest stream-of-consciousness rants.

The country has been suffering through Trump’s lying life for a decade, but hold on. We are seeing a shift in Americans’ willingness to believe the bullshine and brush aside his falsehoods as “Trump being Trump.” Even among his base, there is a sense of mounting regret and anger as the president tries to convince people that they are not struggling and none of it is his fault anyway. Also, the war he started is very unpopular.

Before, many of his deceptions were not necessarily about things that directly affect most people, but with unemployment soaring along with gas and grocery prices, he can’t fib his way out of the affordability crisis — something he has called a “hoax.” For a long while, fact-checking was ineffective among his true believers. Now, those people have receipts, literally, and increasing numbers are beginning to feel duped and abandoned.

As for Leavitt, the 28-year-old is the youngest person to hold the highly visible and once important job of White House Press Secretary. Leavitt distinguished herself as a contentious defender of her boss, no matter what he said or what his “policies” wrought.

Trump needed cover, and Leavitt played her part well. She amplified his fiction, and to curry favor, had a few head-turners of her own. Here are some of her most brazen bon mots:

“President Trump is a humanitarian with a big heart.”

Trump has “common-sense policies across the board.”

“The Trump administration is committed to truth and transparency.”

On Monday, with a straight face, Leavitt said that Trump’s policies have made the country “more affordable.”

One could argue that Leavitt has been lying less as of late, but that is only because she is holding fewer briefings. Historically, the White House press secretary holds a daily press availability. Before Leavitt’s recent maternity leave, she had just 14 briefings in four months.

Bending the truth has been part of politics since early humans started living in tribes, but artfully spinning a message and outright lying are two different things.

For Trump, lying is the default. It’s worked for him for decades. Many of his loyalists know he lies and don’t care. It’s part of his appeal. When asked about the president’s penchant for not telling the truth, James Cassidy, a supporter and unemployed construction worker, told CNN’s Daniel Dale, “He’s ruffling every feather in Washington that he can ruffle. These guys are scrambling. So, yeah! I like it. I think it’s a good thing.”

Cassidy is right, Trump lies to rankle his detractors. He lies not only to spread disinformation, but to spread chaos. By lying so consistently and brazenly and championing “alternative facts,” he is destroying trust in actual facts.

“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer,” the philosopher Hannah Arendt once said.

We have witnessed this phenomenon firsthand. Trump was able to win the White House twice, even after outrageous claims like “thousands and thousands of people were cheering” nearby as the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11 or that Haitian immigrants were eating people’s pets.

But those whoppers were long before cratering approval ratings and midterm elections that threaten his party and his presidency. Even though he knows, or should know, that his lies aren’t sticking like they used to, Trump is so used to doing it, he can’t seem to help himself.

This week, The Washington Post broke the story about an alleged Iranian assassination threat, causing the president to secretly switch planes when leaving the NATO summit in Turkey.

Trump, who was supposed to fly on his new Qatari-gifted jet, said he was flying the former Air Force One “for old time’s sake.” He then exited that plane hiding in a catering truck, leaving the White House press corps and various Cabinet members onboard as unknowing decoys. He took another plane to England, where he then boarded the Qatari plane and returned to Washington.

After the fact, when everyone was home safely, Trump was asked, “You’re saying there wasn’t a security concern?” He responded, “No. No. Why would there be?” The reporter followed up, asking if there were “any other issues?” Again, “no.”

No one is suggesting that the press or the American people should have been informed about the bait-and-switch plan by the Secret Service in real time. But once the threat passed and leaks about it got out, there was no reason to lie about the basic outline of what had happened.

Trump’s lies about his massive ballroom keep growing. The Post reported on Wednesday that the total for all of his White House “improvements” will cost more than $900 million. None of that was approved or appropriated by Congress as required by law. You might remember Trump promised the ballroom would not cost the American taxpayer a penny, that it was his gift to the people of the country.

Trump’s duplicitous workaround involves borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. Congress allocates $2.5 million a year to maintain the White House and its environs. However, the Post found that since Trump took office, the “White House Repair and Restoration” account has $875 million in it. The administration moved about $600 million from other agencies, allocated for things like training Secret Service agents. The balance came from private donors.

And it’s not just the White House. Trump’s Department of Defense has issued a report, according to The Intercept, that says no civilians were killed in the military attacks on speedboats reportedly trafficking narcotics in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean in 2025.

How can this be when more than 120 people were killed in those attacks that experts call extrajudicial killings or outright murder, according to the publication? Just call them narcoterrorists, not civilians.

So the question must be asked: Does anything said by this administration have any connection to the truth? Until Trump leaves office, nothing can be taken for granted.

We can’t ignore or become immune to the constant lies. It is up to Steady, and independent journalists everywhere, to remind the world that Karoline Leavitt, or whoever is speaking for the president, is lying until proven otherwise.

The damage to the institutional reputation and authority of the American presidency is incalculable.

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Stay Steady,
Dan