Trump's Big CON: 'Woe Unto Me!'

"President Trump believes he is being persecuted, and that is a frighteningly dangerous mind-set for a man with such vast power.

Amid a week of dizzying developments on multiple fronts, Trump gave a graduation speech Wednesday at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy portraying himself as a victim, unfairly besieged by those who would destroy him.

'No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly,' Trump said. That is an absurd claim that cannot be taken seriously, of course, but it does give a sense of how the president feels about the scrutiny he faces."

Read the Washington Post, Trump thinks he’s under attack. That’s very dangerous.

The Donald should remember: "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!"

Trump's Big CON: The Score Card of False or Misleading Claims & Promises Kept

UPDATE VI:  Read also Trump's Big CON: There is a Database of the Lies.

UPDATE V:  "Perhaps no politician is a bigger flip-flopper than Donald Trump. During the 2016 campaign, we counted flip-flops on four issues, but in some cases (H-1B visas and the minimum wage), Trump flip-flopped so often that it was just about impossible to determine his actual policy position.

After Trump won the electoral college vote while losing the popular vote, he flip-flopped on the unique American system of electing presidents. Whereas he had once called the electoral college 'a disaster for a democracy,' he began to celebrate it as 'genius.'

The pattern has continued during his presidency. It’s hard to keep up with all of Trump’s changes in position, but here are some major ones in recent weeks."

Read the Washington Post, President Trump, the king of flip-flops.

UPDATE IV: Trump's M.O.: watch fake news, tweet false statements, repeat.

Read the Washington Post, You’ll never guess who tweeted something false that he saw on TV, which notes it is " unusual for a president to spend two hours watching television news programs in the morning."

UPDATE III:  It isn't just Trump, the whole party lies.

Read the Washington Post, This lawmaker’s bio touted a business degree. It was actually a Sizzler training certificate.

UPDATE II:  "At this point it’s easier to list the Trump officials who haven’t been caught lying under oath than those who have. This is not an accident.

Critics of our political culture used to complain, with justification, about politicians’ addiction to spin — their inveterate habit of downplaying awkward facts and presenting their actions in a much better light than they deserved. But all indications are that the age of spin is over. It has been replaced by an era of raw, shameless dishonesty.

In part, of course, the pervasiveness of lies reflects the character of the man at the top: No president, or for that matter major U.S. political figure of any kind, has ever lied as freely and frequently as Donald Trump. But this isn’t just a Trump story. His ability to get away with it, at least so far, requires the support of many enablers: almost all of his party’s elected officials, a large bloc of voters and, all too often, much of the news media.

It’s important not to indulge in an easy cynicism, to say that politicians have always lied and always will. What we’re getting from Mr. Trump is simply on a different plane from anything we’ve seen before.

For one thing, politicians used to limit their outright lies to matters not easily checked — hidden affairs, under the table deals, and so on. But now we have the man who ran the Miss Universe competition in Moscow three years ago, and who declared just last year that 'I know Russia well,' then last month said, 'I haven’t called Russia in 10 years.'

On matters of policy, politicians used to limit their misrepresentations of facts and impacts to relatively hard-to-verify assertions. When George W. Bush insisted that his tax cuts mainly went to the middle class, this wasn’t true, but it took some number-crunching to show that. Mr. Trump, however, makes claims like his assertion that the murder rate — which ticked up in 2015 but is still barely half what it was in 1990 — is at a 45-year high. Furthermore, he just keeps repeating such claims after they’ve been debunked.

And the question is, who’s going to stop him?"

Read The New York Times, Goodbye Spin, Hello Raw Dishonesty.

UPDATE:  "Trump’s agenda is not just unpopular; it is being undermined by flimsy rationales and policy confusion and incompetence."

Read the Washington Post, Trump faces a huge problem, and Bannon’s con-artistry cannot make it disappear.

"Throughout President Trump’s first 100 days, the Fact Checker team will be tracking false and misleading claims made by the president since Jan. 20.

Read the Washington Post, 100 days of Trump claims, which notes that in "the 33 days so far, we’ve counted 132 false or misleading claims."

Read also the Washington Post, Trump Promise Tracker, "tracking the progress of 60 pledges he made during his campaign — and whether he achieved his goals."