In the famous Aesop fable, the shepherd boy amused himself, and annoyed townsfolk, by shouting “Wolf!” when the flock of sheep was actually safe. Eventually, a wolf did show up, and the shepherd boy’s alarms went unheeded. The moral: Nobody believes a liar…even when he’s telling the truth!
It has been said that credibility is like virginity. Once you lose it, you can never get it back.
Credibility is a part of someone’s character that is as valuable as gold, part of a person’s reputation that they must safeguard at all cost. When you run into someone who lacks credibility, you become disbelieving, skeptical, distrustful, suspicious, doubting, and cynical. It is easy to “tune out” such a person and become totally uncooperative with him.
Helen Thomas, who was a respected White House correspondent for 50 years, and covered the administrations of every President from Eisenhower to Obama, once remarked: “I covered two presidents, LBJ and Nixon, who could no longer convince, persuade, or govern, once people had decided that they had no credibility.”
Yeah, I remember that liar.
Thinking back on the Great Depression and World War Two, where would we be if not for the confident, calming, and reassuring fireside chats that President Franklin Roosevelt had with the American people, and the fiesty, cheerleading speeches that Prime Minister Winston Churchill made to Britons facing the Blitzkrieg? These leaders could be believed, they could be trusted, and, therefore, citizens would lay down their lives for the cause. Roosevelt and Churchill promised that the Axis powers would be destroyed, they were, and the world was saved. These guys had credibility.
Contrast that leadership with the spectacle that is now occurring in Washington D.C. We have, in President Donald Trump, an individual who would lie even if the truth would serve him better. Seemingly every day, a new tweet, press release, or speech contains “manufactured truths”, “alternative facts”, baseless gossip, or unsubstantiated wingnut conspiracy theories. This is the basis, evidently, of policy making in the Trump era. Take a lie, wrap it up in bombast, and float it out into the media to see what happens.
Predictably, the hoax is identified, within hours. Then, there is outrage by President Trump, or by his spokespeople, that anyone would doubt the provenance of the story.
This goes on, day after day. It’s been almost two months now, since the Inauguration, and the American public continues to be barraged by this constant stream of lies and “fake news”.
It’s incredible; I’ve never seen anything like it in the past 50 years. A number of “fact checking” news sites have cropped up over the past year, to vet the latest whoppers told by the President and his gang of liars. The scary thing about all of this is that the lies are so easy to discredit. Within minutes of a Trump tweet, speech, or press release, journalists and researchers are able to quickly discredit the story as a total fabrication, an exaggeration, a fanciful urban myth, juicy gossip, or a poor understanding of something that actually happened.
Writers for Saturday Night Live, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and Jimmy Fallon wait breathlessly for each day’s treasure trove of material. Comedians and political cartoonists never had it so good. It’s like stealing. Our President is mercilessly skewered daily, in our country and others.
The ongoing D.C. Circus would be funny if it weren’t so damaging to our country. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said, “There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity.” That is what seems to be going on right now, and it’s hard to discern…why? Are our leaders just plain stupid, or is there something deeper going on here? It’s like we’ve turned the family car over to our 10 year-old child, and we’re watching, helplessly, as he demonstrates that he has no idea how to operate the thing.
What can possibly be gained by throwing all credibility to the wind? Our allies must be alarmed, for sure, to see such amateurish behavior by the so-called “Leader of the Free World”. But, as importantly, how can our allies trust or believe anything that President Trump might tell them at this point. Whatever credibility he had coming into the White House has all but been wiped out by his administration’s Keystone Cops behavior. How do you “ally” with someone who doesn’t know truth from fiction, or, worse, doesn’t care?
If our President was to call a world leader tomorrow and beg for help to resolve a crisis, how would that leader know that the “crisis” was real? Who would want to get into bed with someone who is careless with the facts?
President Trump comes from a background where he was the unquestioned leader of a family business. He reported to no one, and didn’t have to play team ball with anyone. He gave orders based upon his understanding of reality, and others carried out those orders. The fact that Mr. Trump left a number of bankruptcies, failed marriages, and angry creditors, business partners, employees, consumers, and skammed students in his wake…may testify to his understanding of reality. He seems to be ignorant of the relationship between facts and truth.
Any President needs credibility to be a world leader and to get anything of consequence accomplished through Congress. He needs the American public to believe and trust him.
Right before our eyes, President Trump is rapidly depleting any reservoir of credibility that he ever had. And, amazingly, he doesn’t seem to care.
What is he thinking?