As The Threat Of War Looms, Americans Have A President And Staff Who Lie All The Time

President Donald Trump speaks to reporters about the G7 Summit aboard Air Force One while traveling back to Washington from Canada on June 16. What happens when a presidential administration with no fidelity to facts or the truth prepares for a possible entry into another Middle East war?Americans may be about to find out, with reality-game-show-host-turned-president Donald Trump claiming he wants a “deal” with Iran to end its nuclear weapons programme while simultaneously helping Israel mount a major attack on the country and accepting Israel’s claim that Iran was aggressively pursuing a nuclear weapon.“I don’t care what she said,” Trump told reporters on his flight back to Washington on Tuesday, when asked why his own top intelligence official, Tulsi Gabbard, had recently told Congress the exact opposite. “I think they were very close to having one.”Whether Director of National Intelligence Gabbard’s testimony in March was accurate is also unclear.Gabbard last month fired two intelligence officials after the leak of a report finding that the Venezuelan government was not directing the actions of the criminal gang Tren de Aragua in the United States, contrary to assertions made by Trump’s White House.On Tuesday, Gabbard, who built her career in Democratic politics on her opposition to the Iraq War prior to her pro-Trump conversion, told reporters that she and Trump are actually in full agreement. “President Trump was saying the same thing that I said in my annual threat assessment back in March. Unfortunately too many people in the media don’t care to actually read what I said,” she told CNN during a visit to the Capitol.An ODNI official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Gabbard continues to work with Trump. “The DNI has been working closely with President Trump, [Vice President JD] Vance, Secretary [of state Marco] Rubio and the entire national security team actively providing intelligence updates,” the official said.Other Trump political appointees, both public-facing and in managerial roles, got their jobs because they were willing to spread or at least go along with Trump’s most consequential lie to date: that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged” against him and “stolen” by Democrats.So as US military personnel face the possibility of being placed in harm’s way, how can their families and Americans generally have confidence that they are getting accurate information?“I don’t think they can,” said Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University and a longtime critic of Trump’s casual dishonesty and the unwillingness of many journalists to confront it.Trump himself is a prodigious and near-daily liar, on topics as important as the integrity of the 2020 election to as trivial as the size of his rally crowds.And his demand that everyone who works for him in top administration jobs spread his falsehoods, and especially his 2020 election lie, has left him with staff with little or no credibility.Communications director Steven Cheung, for example, is best known for childish, pro-wrestling style insults of journalists. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt cheerfully repeats Trump’s easily disproven falsehoods — that tariffs are paid by foreign countries; that the US under predecessor Joe Biden had been sending $50 million in condoms to Gaza — from the briefing room lectern.And deputy communications director Alex Pfeiffer was a producer for then-Fox News host and conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson, including for the period that generated a three-part documentary claiming that the FBI had incited the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol. “Patriot Purge” was so outlandish that Fox would not run it on the cable network and instead consigned it to its streaming service.Cheung, Leavitt and Pfeiffer did not respond to HuffPost queries for this story.Their boss, meanwhile, continued posting statements about Iran that contradict previous statements from just days earlier.“We remain committed to a Diplomatic Resolution to the Iran Nuclear Issue! My entire Administration has been directed to negotiate with Iran,” he wrote in a social media post on Thursday.“I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal. I told them, in the strongest of words, to ‘just do it,’ but no matter how hard they tried, no matter how close they got, they just couldn’t get it done,” he wrote on Friday, after Israel had started its attack.On Sunday, after another round of Israeli air strikes, he wrote: “The US had nothing to do with the attack on Iran, tonight.”But by Tuesday, Trump had adopted a new position, essentially taking credit for the attacks. “We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran. Iran had good sky trackers and other defensive equipment, and plenty of it, but it doesn’t compare to American made, conceived, and manufactured ‘stuff.’ Nobody does it better than the good ol’ USA.”Trump returned to the White House early on Tuesday, skipping the second and final day of the G7 summit in western Canada of the world’s largest democratic economies. He told reporters he wanted to be back at the White House to be better able to deal with Israel and Iran.The early departure, however, also let him avoid a visit and presentation to the leaders by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose country was invaded by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in 2022, and whose citizens remain under attack in their homes almost nightly by Putin’s drones and missiles.Trump is the sole member of the G7 who speaks highly of Putin. He called Putin’s decision to invade “savvy” and “genius” in the days after it happened. On Monday, Trump again criticised the other G7 nations for having expelled Russia in 2014 from what had been the G8 after Putin invaded Ukraine the first time and annexed the Crimean Peninsula.

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