If context is everything and you're painting it as a "lie," then who exactly is Trump trying to deceive and why?
Absolutely everybody, because he is a clown who never shows his real face. He's actually more like The Joker whose real face is a clown face.
This is the real argument right here. Everything Trump says is a lie because he's a clownish lying clown. If a statement of his has no direct motivation as a lie, nor does he lie stand to gain anything, you can still double down on it being a lie because obviously it's a lie, since he's a liar. The argument is more circular than Barnum and Bailey.
Not absolutely everything is a lie. Don't forget that he also exaggerates and sometimes misremembers. While you're dismissing claims that he lies like a circus clown, don't dismiss the lies themselves. When he held a rally in Michigan a few weeks ago, the following are among other things he said. Here's a true or false test for you...I'll make it easy, find something in here that is a true statement.
* “Did you notice that everybody is saying Merry Christmas again? Did you notice? Saying Merry Christmas.”
* “We have tremendous support in the Republican Party like we’ve never had before — nobody’s ever had this kind of support.”
* “I understand she’s not fixing those potholes [referring to Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer]. That’s what the word is. It was all about roads and they want to raise those gasoline taxes, and you — we don’t want to do that. But she’s not fixing the potholes.”
* “What’s happening now — and by the way, your state, because of us, not because of local government, but because of us, because of the job that we’ve done ... Michigan’s had the best year it’s ever had. Best year it’s ever had. And that’s because we have auto companies expanding and thriving and they’re coming in from Japan and they’re coming In from a lot of other places.”
* “I don’t know if you know this, but probably 10 years ago, I was honored. I was the man of the year by, I think, somebody, whoever. I was the man of the year in Michigan. Can you believe it? Long time. That was long before I ever decided to do this.”
* [About outsourcing US auto jobs]: “I asked that a long time ago and we’ve stopped it. We’ve stopped it.”
* “Now, from the standpoint of the farmers, you know, what’s going on, we had tremendous trade barriers in Canada. We had a tax on dairy products, 297 percent tariff. Nobody talked about it with Canada, and we had some really bad things with Mexico.”
* “We did a [trade] deal with Japan, $40 billion deal with Japan, and we’re not — that was just a little piece of a deal.”
* “We made a great deal with China. And you know, China’s paying us billions and billions of dollars a year, they never gave us 10 cents.”
* “We made the largest ever investment in our military, $738 billion.”
* “Our military, by the way, in all due respect to the previous two administrations, our military was — was depleted, it was
depleted, it was in bad shape.”
* “We had fighter jets that were 35 years old. We had planes that were 60, as you heard, where the father flew him, the grandfather flew him, and now the young son comes in.”
* “We’ve got the best [military] equipment in the world, now spent $2.5 trillion, made in the USA, two and a half trillion.”
* “I won’t tell you this story, but very early on, I thought we were going to have a problem someplace and one of the generals came up to me and said, ‘Sir, don’t go, don’t do it.’ ‘Why?’ ‘We don’t have the ammunition.’ "
* “I’m not allowed to have stock. I can’t have stock. They considered the conflict of interest, and that I can’t understand, I mean, I can’t.”
* “The 401(k)s, where people are up 90 percent, they’re up 97 percent, they’re up 82 percent.”
* “Many other investments we’ve gotten from Japanese companies, car companies and other companies, but they’re all coming in and a lot of them are coming to Michigan.”
* “We’re doing so well in Michigan with the auto companies. Now you’re back, you’re back. So you’re back, very proud of it. Very proud of it. But while we’re creating jobs, fighting for Michigan workers and achieving numbers that you’ve never seen before, incredible victories for the American people are happening.”
* “I have the greatest economy in the history of this country.”
* “You were going down. The regulations were taking it down, the taxes were taking it down. Instead of being up 92 percent or whatever — you’re up a lot — you would have been down, you would have been in less than half, it was crashing for all those people that would say, ‘Oh, it’s the Obama.’ Let me tell you something, you were dying. ... It was heading south as sure as you’re standing.”
* “I’m sorry we couldn’t get your seats; we didn’t have any room. And by the way, 20,000 people outside had to leave.”
* “I watch these guys come in like Biden, he has a — he has a big rally and they get 93 people show up. No, it’s true.”
* “And did you see the new polls from USA Today? Came out, I’m killing everybody, and they hate me. ... USA Today hates me. But there’s a poll, we’re beating everybody.”
* “Biden has this rally like, you know, they got 200 seats, but only a small number of people. So you know what they do? They set up a roundtable. So think of these people. They come in, they think they get to listen to the speech, they end up sitting at a roundtable discussing. They must have been happy, right?”
* “You finally got a choice [referring to the Veterans Choice program]. They’ve been trying to get it for almost 50 years.”
* “The cameras, you ever notice? I go to these stadiums, 25-, 30 thousand people, they never show the crowd.”
* “We set records at every arena and they never even mention the crowds. They never mentioned the crowds, it’s sort of amazing. You know what? I don’t think we’ve ever had an empty seat from the time I came down the escalator — that’s a long time ago. I don’t think we’ve ever had an empty seat."
* “After three years of sinners and witch hunts, hoaxes, scams, tonight the House Democrats are trying to nullify the ballots of tens of millions of patriotic Americans.”
* “Grand Rapids. We have 32,000 people that night, it was one o’clock in the morning. That means it was Election Day [2016] when I started speaking. Hillary, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, and Bill Clinton, they did an emergency trip, they did an emergency trip to Michigan at six o’clock. They got here at prime time, they started to speak. She had 500 people.”
* “The problem is the newspaper polls are more fake than the news they write. They write fake polls. It’s true. They write fake polls. You call them suppression polls, you read them and you get depressed because it looks like you’re doing badly. They do that.”
* “The word is that we’re much higher right now in the polls than we were ever in 2016 in Michigan.”
* “Mexico has 32 percent of your car business. You know that, right? ... Thirty-two percent of our car business moved to Mexico.”
* “Today’s illegal, unconstitutional and partisan impeachment ... Democrat lawmakers do not believe you have the right to select your own president.”
* [Trump on how many other candidates should be on the stage during Republican debate]: “I said, wait a minute. This is no good. I want odd numbers because if you’re center stage, if you have a 10, that means two people are in the middle. So, I said make it 11 or make it nine, okay? Or I’m not showing up. And generally, they did it because we were way ahead from the beginning.”
* “NBC, I made a lot of money for NBC with ‘The Apprentice,’ right? A lot of money, a lot. Plus, we had the No. 1 show a lot, and they had nothing in the top 10, except for a thing called ‘The Apprentice,’ and they treat me so bad.”
* “CNN and MSNBC, their ratings are down the tubes.”
Ugh, getting tired.