Donald Trump reacts next to Melania Trump during a rally at Madison Square Garden, in New York, U.S., October 27, 2024. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
Truth is under siege in America, good people, because without it there can be no justice — which is just how the most notorious crook and liar in United States history wants it.
In Donald Trump’s grotesque and larcenous mind, free and fair elections cannot be believed. Violent coup attempts we all watched on TV never happened. Mothers being murdered in cold blood in our streets by masked marauders are perpetrators, not victims. Vaccines that have saved millions of lives are actually unhealthy, and not to be trusted. The worst job numbers in 22 years are not to be believed ...
Up is down.
(Renee) Good is bad.
It is a lot to take.
Since bursting on the political scene with all the subtlety of the Bubonic plague 11 years ago, Trump has told tens of thousands of lies and mistruths. The Washington Post pegged it at a staggering 30,573 at the end of his first term.
That works out to just shy of 21 lies per day — and these are just the lies we know about, and can drastically affect our daily lives.
Can you imagine how much this guy lies on the golf course?
That violent coup attempt, which was the worst attack on our Capitol since 1812, was spearheaded by his Big Lie, which he refuses to stop telling because it is the gasoline that helps to keep his hellish fires raging in his quest to incinerate our Democracy.
Trump’s lying isn’t a part of the story, it is the story, and amid all the chaos and pain he is eagerly bringing us, we are becoming dangerously close to forgetting that.
U.S. President Donald Trump and lady Melania Trump depart for travel to Texas to tour areas affected by deadly flash flooding, from the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 11, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
We simply cannot trust the President of the United States of America, and the ramifications of that are terrifying.
Trump is a provably terrible, terrible person. This is beyond dispute and something called a fact:
- He has repeatedly verbally and physically abused women.
- He is a proud racist, who has received endorsements from the KKK, myriad white supremacist groups, and murderers like Vladimir Putin.
- He has stolen from charities, and belittled the disabled, and Gold Star families.
The list of truly terrible things he has said and done is endless, but rather than taking up too much of your time rubbing all our faces in his bile, I’ll ask this question:
Why aren’t so many of these things, but mostly the fact that he is an incessant liar, not included in every single story or report about the most dangerous man in the world, and/or his army of fascist enablers in the Republican Party?
This was the crux of my latest piece, in which I grabbed the New York Times by its starched, white lapels and tried to shake some damn sense into them, and the amateurs running their newsroom.
In that piece, I argued that every time our legacy media turns around a meaty story on this grotesque man without mentioning those terrible things, they are doing their readers, viewers, and listeners a disservice.
It is vital background information and context that must be in the reporting about this vile man any time he is making one of his thousands of unsubstantiated claims.
Journalism is about getting at the truth, and then reporting it.
That’s it.
If you are going to report on what the president is telling you fine, but you damn sure better provide context to your reporting.
Just reporting, “Trump said this [fill in the unhinged claim here] on Tuesday,” won’t cut it, unless you also report that the claim is highly suspect because he can’t be counted on to provide the truth.
In fact: He is a liar. Nothing he says can be believed, even if occasionally he swerves into the truth.
Knowing this — and we do without a shadow of a doubt — this is how his claims should be reported: “Trump, who has told tens of thousands of lies and mistruths in the past ten years, made this claim on Tuesday …”
That is accurate reporting.
Any news organization that is not accurate, is not credible. Any news organization that is not credible is not worth anybody’s time.
I am not wrong about this.
Look, I don’t enjoy kicking the crap out of the New York Times like I did on Thursday, though it is my job to do so, when they are not doing their jobs.
At a time when partisan propaganda and lies clog our information highway and are destroying our country, we desperately need places like the New York Times to cut through it all and report the truth.
I don’t know a lot of things, but I do know journalism, and journalism has gone off to die at too many of the once-dependable places along that information highway.
God willing I intend to stay in this fight on behalf of the truth, and the United States of America, until my final breath. As a veteran, I owe the truth, my country, but mostly you at least that much.
Donald Trump is trying to make truth optional in America. If nobody can be believed, nothing can believed. If nothing can be believed, then the most notorious liar in American history will never be stopped.
Don’t stop telling the truth, patriots. We must cling to it and never let go.
Shout it out.
It is the only thing that will truly set us free.
D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.