I liked an article in The Atlantic, published online on September 5, 2024. The article was titled, "An Article the Likes of Which Nobody Has Ever Seen Before." It was authored by David A. Graham, a staff writer at the magazine.
What I most liked about the article is that Graham has taken seriously the actual words being used by a political actor, operating in the public realm, and has subjected them to a more or less rigorous analysis. Specifically, Graham points out in his article that presidential candidate Donald J. Trump frequently (almost compulsively) inserts the following phrase into whatever he is saying: "...nobody has ever seen before." For instance (from Graham's article):
“Groceries, food has gone up at levels that nobody’s ever seen before. We’ve never seen anything like it—50, 60, 70 percent,” Trump said recently. (This is not true, though if it were, it would be unlike anything seen in American history.) ...
He used the same phrase to speak about law and order last month: “We’re here today to talk about how we are going to stop the Kamala crime wave that is going on at levels that nobody has ever seen before.” (The country is not even at its most violent point in Trump’s life, much less ever.)
Political observers have frequently noted that Trump lies. But don't all politicians lie? Maybe, but Graham's article convinced me that Trump is in a class of his own. Wikipedia would seem to concur:
During and after his term as President of the United States, Donald Trump made tens of thousands of false or misleading claims. The Washington Post's fact-checkers documented 30,573 false or misleading claims during his presidential term, an average of about 21 per day. The Toronto Star tallied 5,276 false claims from January 2017 to June 2019, an average of 6 per day. Commentators and fact-checkers have described the scale of Trump's mendacity as "unprecedented" in American politics, and the consistency of falsehoods a distinctive part of his business and political identities. Scholarly analysis of Trump's tweets found "significant evidence" of an intent to deceive.
Lies, mendacity, false statements? Don't all politicians lie? With Trump, it's at levels that nobody's ever seen before!
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