Dear Editor:

Of all the ways Trump has kneecapped America — kowtowing to dictators, refusing to protect our voting systems, threatening our allies, reversing our attempts to preserve public lands and restore damaged environments, shredding global trade agreements, unilaterally dragging nations into unnecessary trade wars, packing our courts with ideological extremists, exacerbating income inequality, and dismantling health insurance networks for millions of us — the most insidious is his compulsion to lie about everything, all the time.

His mendacity is pathological but also keenly strategic: the jackhammer of his spoken and tweeted lies is undermining our ability to debate policies that emerge from the dust and debris of his self-aggrandizing, malicious rhetoric.

I offer just three examples of his assault on plain truth, his baseless claims about voter fraud, his lies about our current economy, and his war on responsible journalism:

1. His Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity was so patently phony that he disbanded it after seven months and no report. Only a federal lawsuit could lift the rock under which Mike Pence and Kris Kobach tried to confirm Trump’s shameless lie that 3 to 5 million fraudulent votes were cast for Hillary in 2016.

2. A recent Trump tweet claimed that “In many ways this is the greatest economy in the history of America and the best time ever to look for a job!”  (“Wage growth is moderate, productivity remains tepid and expansion has averaged 2.4 percent on a year-over-year basis since Trump took office, well below the 4.4 percent of the 1950s and 1960s” Jeanna Smialek in Bloomberg.)

3. At a time when reporters throughout the world are being censored, beaten, jailed and killed, Trump has incited his base to revile and shout down our journalists at his rallies and press conferences, calling them “the enemy of the people.” In doing so, he echoes the mass murderers Robespierre and Lenin.

Mix these toxic ingredients in a big bowl (4,229 presidential lies as of Aug. 3, 2018), heat them with xenophobic hate and wounded narcissism, and you are baking a cake that looks like Italy in 1925 and Germany in 1932.

Bill Hammond

Trevett