I have been reading Ron Chernow’s biography of Mark Twain. Among his many critiques of the human condition, Twain once wrote that “all men are liars, partial or hiders of facts, half tellers of truths, shirks, moral sneaks.” 

I doubt that all men or women are habitual liars, even if my strong hunch is that virtually nobody alive has never fibbed at least once or twice. Surely, some of us lie more than others; some whoppers are bigger than others.

I think we can agree lying is bad, morally wrong. Judaism certainly does not condone it. The Ninth Commandment plainly states, “Thou shall not bear false witness.” One commentator (Rabbi Menachem Posner) writes: “Truth is a prized quality in Judaism, to the point that Talmud calls it G-d’s own signature.”

ADVERTISEMENT

If lying has always been a human flaw, many observers believe that it has gotten worse over time and that today, especially, it has reached a crisis point. Read Michiko Kakutani’s “The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump.”

Kakutani traces the decline of truth-telling to a variety of societal and cultural forces, including the news media, the internet, television and schools. The news media exhibit tremendous bias driven by their ideological inclinations. The internet is notorious for attracting and reinforcing niche audiences into silos with hardened, polar viewpoints. Television commercials are built on deceit. In schools it is no longer fashionable to teach facts as an important goal of education; schools are big on character education, but the pursuit of knowledge — truth — is not part of the equation.

Although both the right and the left have contributed to the problem, Kakutani focuses particularly on the collapse of honesty on the part of the current occupant of the White House.

ADVERTISEMENT

I must admit, as someone who leans conservative, I have become increasingly upset with how Donald Trump constantly embellishes, exaggerates and outright lies. He is his own worst enemy in engaging in the worst sort of braggadocio and megalomania, using White House meetings with foreign dignitaries to blow his horn on how he personally has resolved half a dozen conflicts and achieved other miraculous successes.

I have supported many of his policies but find him taking matters much too far. 

• On immigration, he is right to want to restrict illegal entry into the country, but he needlessly ignores due process in many deportation cases.

• On crime, he is right to want to reduce high murder, carjacking and other such rates in American cities, but putting National Guard troops armed with military weapons on our streets is an over-the-top response to the problem.

• On DEI matters, he is right to want to reduce “wokeism” and resurrect the axiom that the most qualified person should get the job, but does this require a complete housecleaning of the Smithsonian Institution and a sanitizing of our history?

• On the weaponization of the Department of Justice, he is right to want to undo the kind of overzealous prosecutions he experienced in the past, but how does that square with punishing the likes of political opponents such as John Bolton?

• On foreign policy, he is right to want to strengthen U.S. and NATO military forces, but his outlandish threat to take ownership of Greenland from our ally Denmark and his silly renaming of the Gulf of Mexico only undermine our reputation as leader of the free world. 

What aggravates these heavy-handed policy moves and invites criticism of Trump more than anything is, as noted above, his failure to tell the truth. The Democrats lie as well and are, in my judgment, on the wrong side on immigration and most other issues, which is why I cannot support them. When my liberal friends constantly claim America today is a “fascist, Nazi-like, police state,” they rival Trump for embellishment and exaggeration.

If Trump overreaches, Bernie Sanders and company under-reach. The classic case is Zohran Mamdani, who called for a “global intifada” and “defunding the police” to win his New York City mayoral primary race and then, to win wider support, said he did not really mean it. (At least Trump largely has carried out what he promised to do during his campaign even if at times going overboard.) 

The question remains whether any of us value facts enough today to pressure our elected officials — and ourselves — not to “bear false witness.”