Horowitz: It’s Time for Trump to Stop Peddling Falsehoods

Tuesday, December 06, 2016

Rob Horowitz, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”

The former US Senator, Domestic Policy Advisor to Democratic and Republican Presidents, UN Ambassador and Harvard Professor must be rolling around in his grave watching President-elect Donald Trump.

The convictions of some observers was that the shear scale of the challenge of being President would prompt Trump to begin limiting the amount of falsehoods he attempts to peddle -the kind of untruths he repeatedly told on the campaign trail, earning him the distrust of more than 6-in-10 voters according to Exit Polls.

Those hopes that the majesty of the office would ennoble the Businessman and former Reality Star were made to look more like wishful thinking by Trump’s false claim last week that he would have won the popular vote if there weren’t millions of people who voted illegally. Trump tweeted, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” When reporters and commentators raised doubts about this just plain falsehood, Trump elaborated in a follow-up tweet: “Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire, and California – so why isn't the media reporting on this? Serious bias – big problem!”

To make matters even worse, instead of simply admitting a mistake, Trump sent his Transition Press Secretary Jason Miller out to mischaracterize studies and spin shamelessly in a pathetic attempt to defend the indefensible. And this weekend, surrogates for the President-elect were still trying to create a new reality, arguing that since you can’t conclusively prove a negative, we don’t know whether what the President-elect was true or false. In a sharp exchange with George Stephanopoulos, for example, Vice-President-elect Mike Pence referring to Trump’s absurd assertion that he really won the popular vote, said, I don't know that that is a false statement, George, and neither do you,"

Recognizing that the President-elect is unlikely to curb his penchant for making things up, some of his allies are starting to assert that we shouldn’t take what he says ‘literally--- that what is a dangerous tendency to invent stories to either make himself look better or buttress a case he is attempting to make is really the fact that he is ‘just speaking his mind’ and ‘”connecting with the American people.’ It is no accident that both Vice-President-elect Pence and Speaker Ryan described Donald Trump’s tweeting as ‘refreshing’ in separate interviews this past weekend. In the case of his unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud as is too often the case for the President-elect, he was motivated by the fact he didn’t think he was getting sufficient credit for his victory because there was too much talk about Clinton winning the popular vote by more than 2 million.

The American people expect their President to tell them the truth. In a crisis, the ability to trust what the President is communicating is of particular importance. The people around Donald Trump and his band of “normalizers” in the media may be pleasing him in the short-run by excusing his playing fast and loose with the facts, but they would be serving him and the nation better in the long-run by not enabling this destructive behavior.

Successful Presidents earn the public’s trust. Donald Trump has a long way to go on this score and so far during the transition he is digging a bigger hole for himself, rather than fixing the problem. It is time for his closest advisors to put the nation first and speak truth to power.

Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island