Trump lied and lied, but news organizations refuse to say so

The news coverage about Donald Trump’s alleged plan to visit Alaska to campaign for Sen. Dan Sullivan presented this alleged information as if it came from a man with full control of his faculties during a coherent presentation.

The news coverage ignored and thereby concealed the context, which is that Trump made his so-called announcement after nearly 50 disjointed minutes of lies and half-truths about everything from the evil Canadians to his ballroom obsession, his beautiful helipad and how cheap gasoline was a year ago.

Trump gathered tourism executives to stand behind him and praise his leadership on tourism. That was supposed to be the topic of the day.

Trump’s inability to focus is now taken for granted by reporters, who are doing a disservice to the public by taking his comments at face value.

Does he really plan to campaign in Alaska? Who knows?

Perhaps he was just throwing that out like his comment that he would rechristen a certain waterway the Strait of Trump, a passage that he insisted is under the “very strong control” of the U.S.?

Among the dozens of topics Trump meandered into, he claimed that Ken Paxton was “the single, strongest, smartest attorney general in the United States.” He said he is happy that Prince Harry and Meghan are gone. He said the war in Ukraine would never have happened if the 2020 election hadn’t been stolen.

His biggest lie was that he has now forced other nations to invest $20 trillion in the U.S.

“There's never been a country even close to that number. A lot of it is because of the tariffs, because people don't want to pay tariffs, so they build their plants here. Honda just announced they're coming in with a big one, monster, big -- we have many car companies that are coming in from Canada, as you probably have been reading,” Trump lied.

It’s possible that Trump had no real plan to visit Alaska to prop up Sullivan, given the way the topic came up and his off-handed comments. This important element was entirely missing from the Alaska news coverage.

Trump lied repeatedly about the situation in Alaska. He lied about how ranked choice voting works. He lied about why Sen. Dan Sullivan is trailing Democrat Mary Peltola. He lied that Dan J. Sullivan has never voted. And he lied that it has been proven that Dan J. Sullivan is not acting on his own, but was put up by the Democrats.

It is easy to prove that Trump was lying. He was not making “assertions,” or “claims,” though that is how Alaska news organization chose to whitewash Trump’s remarks.

Here is the transcript from Roll Call. Sullivan’s name came up 46 minutes into the ordeal.

Question: Your endorsement of Darlene Graham was pivotal. It was crucial in helping her win her runoff election. There's another close election that's happening out in Alaska, as Senator Sullivan is in a tight race.

Trump: Good man.

Question: Do you anticipate actually traveling out to Alaska to help him out?

Trump: Yeah. I mean, you would have to go with me. Yeah, I do, I'll go out there to fight for him, just to show you how crooked the Democrats are. First of all, they have ranked choice, which is a, which is a crooked form of voting, it's totally dishonest, ranked choice. They throw everybody into a hat and somebody backstage that nobody knows picks a winner.

It's ridiculous. But they have a man named—we have a very good Senator named Dan Sullivan. The Democrats put up another man named Dan Sullivan. So, we have two Dan Sullivan's on the— and by the way, the other man who has never been in politics, had never voted—he hasn't voted for years, a totally pretty non-political person, I guess, but never had any thought of running.

All of a sudden, he's running for the Senate in Alaska; his name is Dan Sullivan. They have the same name. And that guy got two and a half percent in the recent primary. And that's—you know, 2.5 percent is a lot when it comes to winning elections. And it's a disgrace. They went to the court and the court made it a little bit easier. They put an initial or something on the one, but it's very unfair. I will go to Alaska to help Dan Sullivan get elected.

Dan Sullivan, it's like Ken Paxton. Dan Sullivan's a great Senator. Dan, I mean, you look at the thing he's—the things he's done he would call me all the time because I think no—I definitely know nobody has helped Alaska like Donald Trump. We've invested billions and billions of dollars and created trillions of dollars in value.

You have Japan, you have South Korea, you have all of these people now going to Alaska to load up with fuel, load up with oil, build pipelines, everything else. And Dan Sullivan has done a great job, and I will -- it's a long trip. I love Alaska. You know, I won Alaska by a landslide.

Reporer: 13.5 points sir.

Trump: How much?

Reporter: 13.5 points.

Trump: Oh, I thought it was 23 or 24. 13.5 is a lot, not bad.

Question: Why do you think—Mr. President, you won it by 13.5 points, why is this race so close given your strength there?

Trump: Well, it's close for one reason, that they have a phony Dan Sullivan. This guy's a phony. And he was put up by the Democrats and they don't admit it, but it's been so proven. So I will go to Alaska to make sure that a great Senator gets reelected. I will be going to Alaska. I'm going to be going the last 30 days before the election.

I'll be making a lot of stops. You see how I helped Darlene? You see how I helped the governor, the future governor of Oklahoma. He was way behind, and I endorsed him. And I did tele-town halls for him I did, and he ended up winning against somebody that seemed to have an insurmountable lead. He's great.

He's going to be a great governor for Oklahoma. I won—in Oklahoma they have 77 counties, as you know, all three times, I won 77 counties. They like me. Peter, I think I should just move there. They like me. They seriously like me in Oklahoma. And you know who second was, Ronald Reagan in '56, but I won 77 out of 77 counties in Oklahoma.

And I endorsed him and he won and it was an amazing victory. You know, there was a victory that everybody said couldn't happen. So I'm going to be campaigning for numerous people, both Congressmen, a few governors. I love the governors, but we're interested in the Senate and we're interested in the House.

News coverage

The newly resurrected Anchorage Press had the best coverage of Trump’s liefest, taking the time to demonstrate that Dan J. Sullivan has voted more than 30 times over the last 26 years.

Reporter Nat Herz said he wrote to the White House to ask someone to explain where Trump got his “bad information.” But that’s never going to happen and there is no need to keep up the pretense. This was not “bad information.”

Trump was lying. He lies all the time. He gets away with it because the broken communications world has devolved into a hurricane-force storm in which the truth and facts are blown away by a man to whom lying is as natural as sleeping.

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