Add Category
With Trump fever running high at the moment you'd be forgiven for thinking he invented lying in politics or that he represented some new low in the American presidency.
Some have rushed to call him a "despot". They have clearly never lived under or experienced a true despot.
I spent many years reporting in authoritarian countries — China, North Korea, Saddam Hussein's Iraq — where despots jail or kill journalists and hold entire communities in terror.
Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan is closer to a despot, seizing virtual control of the country's newspapers and television. He silences dissent and carries out witch hunts against rivals and dissidents.
Vladimir Putin is closer to a despot. India's Narendra Modi has shown signs of increasing despotism; he is a man, by the way, that Barack Obama once hailed as representing "the dynamism and potential of India's rise".
Trump is more clown than despot. After watching Trump's inauguration, British political scientist David Runciman described it as "a cartoon version of fascism".
Four years later, the "comic despot" has not hijacked democracy; he is a tragicomic figure lost in his own delusions.
As Andrea Prasow, the deputy Washington director at Human Rights Watch, wrote in 2017, Trump might cosy up to the likes of Putin, "But Trump is not likely to become Putin, no matter how badly he might want to".
Why? Because, as Prasow argued, the checks and balances of America's institutions won't let him.
That's what is happening now. Trump has presented no evidence to support his claims of voter fraud.
America's lies are baked in
The US election will in time be formally declared, whether Trump concedes or not. On January 20, Joe Biden will be sworn in as the 46th president of the United States no matter whether Trump is present or not.
But don't think for a minute Trump is an aberration — or that he invented the lie. America's lies are baked in.
Journalist and author Masha Gessen calls it the "power lie" — a lie that signals: I can do what I want, say what I want and what are you going to do about it?
Gessen knows something about this, having lived in and fled Putin's Russia. She says Trump has exploited the "power lie" — a "Trumpian lie", she says, that redefines language in "a battle of realities".
But it didn't begin with Trump. The US was born with the power lie, with the invasion and genocide of First Nations people, the enslavement of Africans on whose scarred backs America built its economy.
What greater power lie is there than the Declaration of Independence, which includes the assertion that "all men are created equal"? It was signed by slaveholders.
It is a promissory note that, more than two centuries later, America still has not fully honoured. It remains a deeply unequal society where race can determine one's fate.
President Andrew Jackson was a slaveholder who launched a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Native Americans — the forced, bloody removal of tens of thousands of people — subjecting them to disease and starvation that killed thousands and is remembered today as the "Trail of Tears".
The Indian Removal Act was a power lie. And people think Trump is the worst President America has had?
Power lies and public scrutiny
Fast forward to the late 1960s and President Richard Nixon — supported by his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger — launched a secret bombing campaign against Cambodia without informing Congress or many high-ranking military staff.
As Nixon told Kissinger, there must be: "No comment, no warnings ... not one thing to be said to anyone publicly or privately without my prior approval."
Operation Menu and Operation Freedom Deal were power lies.
The Watergate scandal and the secret Nixon Tapes would later reveal the extent of the president's duplicity, dishonesty and treachery.
Bill Clinton's dishonesty wasn't of the Nixon magnitude, but he was impeached for lying about his affair with White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. He lowered the bar again for personal behaviour in the White House.
George W. Bush believed his own lies that Saddam Hussein was behind the September 11 terrorist attacks and fed the public bogus claims that the Iraqi dictator harboured weapons of mass destruction.
Bush sent America to a war that killed thousands of his own people and lit a spark in the Middle East the region has never recovered from.
Barack Obama ran a "remote killing" operation using drones to target terrorists. But he went much further than that, ordering strikes in countries like Pakistan outside declared war zones. His drone strikes killed many innocent people.
Obama used state-secrets privilege to keep the attacks classified and away from public scrutiny.
American media outlets like the New York Times and The Atlantic gained access to material that revealed Obama's complicity and secrecy and that the Obama administration lied about the death tolls.
Online publication The Intercept published a trove of previously secret government documents detailing drone killings in Yemen and Somalia. In one campaign in north-eastern Afghanistan between 2012 and 2013: "US special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were intended targets."
Remote killing of civilians is a power lie.
Americans know too well the lies of their presidents
Donald Trump has lied like so many American presidents before him; his handling of the coronavirus shows that, just like with other leaders, his lies cost lives.
America has survived its worst presidents and its history of lies. In spite of it all it has been a remarkable country. Its promise of hope has lured people from all around the world, chasing their dreams. Yet today that hope looks more like another lie.
President-elect Joe Biden is peddling his own myth about a land of "possibilities" that tens of millions of Americans gave up on a long time ago.
Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton chronicle this downward spiral in their book, Deaths of Despair. It is devastating portrait of a lost generation; an America of 'haves-and-have-nots', where a four-year college degree is not just the difference between career prospects but between life and death.
This is an America of meaningless or no work, declining wages and shattered families.
Harvard University philosopher Michael Sandel reveals in his latest book a country in which the rich get richer and the poor stay where they are.
The richest one per cent, Sandel points out, earn more than the bottom half combined. If you're born poor, you likely stay poor. Of those in the bottom fifth of the income scale, Sandel says, "only about one in 20 will make it to the top fifth".
But Biden and Kamala Harris say you can make it if you try.
Harris points to her black, Indian and immigrant background — she will become the first female vice-president — as proof of the American Dream. But Harris is the daughter of solidly middle-class parents who are university academics. She never had to "make it".
Now Harris's husband Doug Emhoff — a wealthy partner in a prestigious law firm — is reportedly in line for a White House job.
Just like Trump's family, just like the Clintons, the Bushes and the Obamas: more power and privilege passed around like presents under a Christmas tree.
Little wonder so many Americans see Washington politics as a racket that serves the wealthy.
The poor and left-behind are not fooled. Americans know too well the lies their presidents tell while they have to live with the devastating, sad truth of their own lives.
