Trump's Big CON: Want to Know The Donald's True Character, Play Golf With Him (AKA Our Pinocchio President (© NoBullU.com))

UPDATE II:  You must read the Washington Post, Why the most dishonest president in history can’t fool us about what matters, which notes:

"During a presidential campaign in which Donald Trump upended our baseline assumptions about politics and truth-telling, many asked what it would be like if someone so profoundly dishonest, who lied so easily, so shamelessly and so promiscuously actually became president. Would it create an ongoing crisis of legitimacy? Would it permanently debase our democracy? Would we even be able to have sane debates about important issues?

The answers to those questions are starting to take shape, and while the news is by no means good, there are glimmers of hope. It turns out that we didn’t all just throw up our hands and give up on any notion of truth. Policing the president’s boundless mendacity is taking up an enormous proportion of our time and attention — but in an odd way, that may protect us.

The latest occasion to consider the effects of President Trump’s unique enthusiasm for deception comes out of an interview he did with the Wall Street Journal, where he commented on his disastrous speech last week to the Boy Scout Jamboree. With characteristic classlessness, Trump took an event at which presidents usually talk about things like citizenship and integrity and instead delivered a rambling, partisan speech that also included a bizarre story about a developer and his party yacht ('I won’t go any more than that because you’re Boy Scouts. … Oh, you’re Boy Scouts, but you know life.'). To the Journal, Trump claimed, 'I got a call from the head of the Boy Scouts saying it was the greatest speech that was ever made to them, and they were very thankful.'

Anyone who heard this immediately knew it couldn’t possibly be true, particularly because the head of the Boy Scouts had issued a public apology for the fact that the president had given such an inappropriate speech at their event. It fits a pattern in which Trump claims absurdly that people are calling him up to tell him that a speech he gave was the greatest thing anyone had ever heard; about the speech he gave on a recent trip to Poland, he said, 'enemies of mine are saying it was the greatest speech ever made on foreign soil by a president,' which no one was saying.

After the Boy Scouts told reporters that there was no such phone call of praise to Trump, something amazing happened: Trump’s spokeswoman admitted that he made the whole thing up. Sort of. Asked by a reporter whether Trump had lied about the Boy Scouts and about another apparently fabricated phone call, this one from Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, Sarah Huckabee Sanders replied that while there was no phone call, 'multiple members of the Boy Scout leadership, following his speech there that day, congratulated him, praised him. … I wouldn’t say it was a lie.'

Of course she wouldn’t, because admitting that truth would probably get her fired. But this somewhat trivial story illustrates that this has become a central component of the relationship between the press and the White House: Trump tells a bunch of lies, reporters track down the truth then confront his spokesmen to see how they’ll try to spin it away, and report the results.

You can look at it as a kind of game, but something fundamental has changed. We now assume as a matter of course that whatever the president of the United States says is probably false. This is a 180-degree shift from how every president before him, Democrat and Republican, has been approached. All presidents have lied from time to time, but most of what they said was still true. Not so with Trump."

UPDATE: Read also the Washington Post, 8 things the Trump team denied, and then later confirmed, subsequently updated as 9 times the Trump team denied something — and then confirmed it.

Note: the internet link indicates it was originally titled: 7 things the Trump team denied, and then later confirmed.

How many times will it be updated?

"The famed 20th-century golf pro and instructor Percy Boomer said that the game reveals much about the man. 'If you wish to hide your character, do not play golf,' he said.

But Trump plays, and reveals more than we’d like to see."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s golf game tells us an awful lot about Trump, which notes:

"The late golf legend Bobby Jones called his sport “the closest game to the game we call life. You get bad breaks from good shots; you get good breaks from bad shots — but you have to play the ball where it lies.”

Unless you are Donald Trump. . .

Golf is a game of humility: Even the best players are brought low by nature and chance. And it’s a game of honor: You keep your own score and are often unseen by other players.

Then there is Trump golf. He breaks rules, exaggerates scores and ignores the game’s decorum. Sound familiar? He is, Sports Illustrated asserted, “easily the best golfer” ever to occupy the White House. Likewise, he is an enormously talented politician, with a genius for marketing. Yet in golf, as in life, he doesn’t leave it at that. He gilds the lily with dishonesty. . .

So why does he desecrate the game he loves? He drives his cart on greens and tee boxes. He talks through other players’ shots. He 'doesn’t play a round of golf so much as narrate it, his commentary peppered with hyperbole,' SI reports. He says he’s attracted to the game by 'walking down all those beautiful fairways,' but he only rides in a cart.

Maybe Trump has a chip on his shoulder because the old-boy golf clubs wouldn’t admit the gauche showman. So he built his own. Now the populist Trump boasts that he’s “the best golfer of all the rich people.”

Or maybe he can’t help himself. Not satisfied being a very good golfer, he shaves scores, boasts of championships un-won and tears up greens with carts — because he can."