Trump's Insults and Lies

By the time you are reading this, Joe Biden should be the 46th president of the United States. I watched Trump leaving the White House this morning, and I have rarely been so happy to see someone's back on the way out. 

Trump was an incredibly divisive president. His insults and lies, many of which were posted to Twitter, were continuous and numerous throughout his tenure as president. I'm going to point out a couple of articles relevant to that. 

First, the New York Times has compiled a list of all of Trump's Twitter insults. As a (retired) technical writer, I am seriously impressed with this list. You can view it in alphabetic order by the subject of the insult, or chronologically. I would very much like to know the technical details of how it was assembled and published. I do feel sorry for the writers and editors who had to wade through all of this crap.

Second, I feel sorry for Daniel Dale, fact-checker extraordinaire, who has been reporting Trump's lies since 2016, first at the Toronto Star and then at CNN. In this article, he looks back on four years of covering virtually every word from Trump. I am surprised he stayed sane. I hope he gets to take a long vacation someplace warm.

I lost my composure only once. Watching an early pandemic briefing in which Trump falsely assured Americans that the virus was under control, I choked up for a minute thinking of all the people who would probably die because of the President's mendacity.

There was nothing to be done to stop him. Whether it was his consequential coronavirus lies or trivial lies like the Michigan Man of the Year fabrication, he kept lying no matter how many times fact checkers noted he was wrong. People kept asking me if the work felt pointless given his imperviousness to correction.

It never did. The point was never to change Trump's own behavior.

I had three aims. One, to get readers and viewers the facts they were not getting from their president. Two, to show other journalists when the President was lying so they might incorporate that information into their own work. Three, to take a stand for truth -- to declare that there was still such a thing as verifiable reality, no matter how hard Trump tried to erase it, and that we weren't going to surrender, no matter how hard Trump tried to discredit us.

I sincerely hope that I will be posting much less about Trump, his minions, and his deluded followers in the future.