The Lying Matters Because You Can't Believe Them When It Matters Most

From Esquire

It's never enough to just say the guy is good. Everything has to be The Best. You wouldn't believe how good it is.

The situation at hand is that Donald Trump, American president, made an unscheduled visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Saturday. White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham soon came out with a statement suggesting that, "Anticipating a very busy 2020, the President is taking advantage of a free weekend here in Washington, D.C." to "begin portions of his routine annual physical exam." But CNN cites "a person familiar with the matter" who says the visit did not follow protocol, and further reports the visit was not even in the president's internal—non-public—schedule as of Saturday morning. Meanwhile, the president was not seen publicly on Sunday, and his Monday schedule features no public events. The indications are he will be behind-closed-doors for two days after this routine check-up.

The unfortunate truth is that because this administration has lied so relentlessly, about things big and small, that it is impossible to take anyone's word at face value when it really matters. The same was true when Vice President Mike Pence suddenly cancelled a trip to New Hampshire and his spokesperson, Alyssa Farah, said, "Something came up that required the VP to stay in DC." It turned out they realized at the last second he was set to glad-hand an accused drug trafficker up in New England, but there were a million reasons not to believe the first account.

That's where we're at when it comes to the president's health now. The visit could well have been routine, but we can't take their word for it. The press secretary responded to the CNN story by repeating that the president is "in good health and it was a routine checkup as part of his annual physical." She added that, "I've given plenty of on the record statements that were truthful and accurate," which is not a particularly encouraging self-assessment: I have, at times, told the truth. Her overall credibility also was not boosted by her appearance on Jeanine Pirro's Wacky Wavy Inflatable News Hour on Saturday night.

Yes, the president—an overweight man who spends large chunks of his time watching television and playing golf, during which he walks as little as possible because he reportedly believes we have a finite amount of energy to expend throughout our lifetimes—is "almost superhuman." As others have already observed, this is some North Korean state TV shit. You can support the president without constructing this weird mythos around him as the ubermensch, one that defies observable reality in every relevant way. Unless, of course, your intent is to exercise power over the truth itself, to encourage people to ignore their eyes and ears and accept what The Leader and his apparatchiks say without question.

You expect this stuff from Pirro, who offers totalitarian praise for the American president when she's not getting suspended by Fox News for essentially saying that Islam is incompatible with the Constitution—and thus, that Americans like Ilhan Omar cannot really be Americans. (This was too direct even for Fox, which demands just a bit more slight-of-hand when painting certain people as The Other.) But we're also getting it from the White House press secretary, who cannot just say that the 73-year-old guy with the definitely real hair and the thick layer of makeup is healthy and fine. He has to have The Most Energy of Anyone in the White House. I'm surprised it wasn't The Most Energy of Any President, Ever. Period. Except Maybe Abraham Lincoln, Who People Are Talking About More and More. Maybe it's all an extension of the psychosexual anxiety permeating this movement, where Trump can be found in cartoons as a svelte, muscle-bound 32-year-old.

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