‘Liar,liar pants on fire!’

Daniel Dale of Toronto Star has compiled the first 5276 false things Donald Trump has said as US President for 835 days, starting with his inauguration on January 20,2017, keeping track of every false claim he made as US President. Historians say there have never been such a constant liar in the Oval Office. They expected dishonesty challenged, inaccurate information corrected, and finally the sheer frequency of Trump’s inaccuracy became the central story of his Presidency. If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of ‘false claims’ instead of lies? It has recorded a false claim he has repeated over 146 times is about the ‘Wall’; ‘The wall is being built. We just left the Army Corps of Engineers, we have…….we will soon have hundreds of miles under construction and we will have over 400 miles completed by the end of next year.’

The most worrisome moment, for Daniel Dale, seems to be President Trump’s bizarre rant about crowd size, his bogus claim about election fraud or his moves towards bringing back torture, blocking refugees and revoking a trade war with Mexico. The most troubling moment was when he spoke about the weather. ’It was almost raining’ the President told CIA workers in Langley, recounting his inaugural address but God looked down and he said, we are not going to let the rain on your speech. In fact, when I first started I said Oh no. The first time I got hit by a couple of drops. And I said oh this is too bad, but we’ll go right through it. But the truth is that it stopped immediately. It was amazing. And then it became really sunny. And then I walked off and it poured right after I left. ‘It poured’.

There is a saying that ‘lies will always be bitter in the end, no matter how sweet you made it at the beginning’. The British wartime Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, once said ‘A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.’ The simple rhyme we chose as a caption here; ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire!’ is known even to children in the US. They say it when someone  gets caught in a lie. ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire!’ was also, we recall, a 1960s hit number by the garage rock band ‘The Castaway’!

S.H.MOULANA