There's a long history of presidential untruths. Here's why Donald Trump is 'in a class by himself'
by Mark Z. Barabak
As president, Ronald Reagan spoke movingly of the shock and horror he felt as part of a military film crew documenting firsthand the atrocities of the Nazi death camps.
The story wasn’t true.
Years later, an adamant, finger-wagging Bill Clinton looked straight into a live TV camera and told the American people he never had sex with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
He was lying.
Presidents of all stripes and both major political parties have bent, massaged or shaded the truth, elided uncomfortable facts or otherwise misled the public — unwittingly or, sometimes, very purposefully.
“It’s not surprising,” said Charles Lewis, a journalism professor at American University who wrote a book chronicling presidential deceptions. “It’s as old as time itself.”
But White House scholars and other students of government agree there has never been a president like Donald Trump, whose volume of falsehoods, misstatements and serial exaggerations — on matters large and wincingly small — place him “in a class by himself,” as Texas A&M’s George Edwards put it.
“He is by far the most mendacious president in American history,” said Edwards, a political scientist who edits the scholarly journal Presidential Studies Quarterly. (His assessment takes in the whole of Trump’s hyperbolic history, as the former real estate developer and reality TV personality has only been in office since Jan. 20.)
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http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-trump-presidential-lies-2017-story.html
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