Close Menu
The Baylor Lariat
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram YouTube LinkedIn
    Trending
    • Baylor community unites in flash flood relief efforts
    • Baylor rescinds LGBTQIA+ inclusion research grant after backlash
    • Students react to emergency alert following campus lockdown
    • Baylor shelter-in-place lifted following police pursuit of robbery suspects
    • Baylor graduate charged after killing cats with pellet gun, hanging bodies over utility lines
    • Baylor Football’s Alex Foster dies at 18
    • Board of Regents confirms budget, renovations, new leadership in May meeting
    • How facilities responds to storms, flooding in campus buildings
    • About us
      • Spring 2025 Staff Page
      • Copyright Information
    • Contact
      • Contact Information
      • Letters to the Editor
      • Subscribe to The Morning Buzz
      • Department of Student Media
    • Employment
    • PDF Archives
    • RSS Feeds
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram YouTube LinkedIn
    The Baylor LariatThe Baylor Lariat
    Subscribe to the Morning Buzz
    Sunday, July 13
    • News
      • State and National News
        • State
        • National
      • Politics
        • 2025 Inauguration Page
        • Election Page
      • Homecoming Page
      • Baylor News
      • Waco Updates
      • Campus and Waco Crime
    • Arts & Life
      • Wedding Edition 2025
      • What to Do in Waco
      • Campus Culture
      • Indy and Belle
      • Sing 2025
      • Leisure and Travel
        • Leisure
        • Travel
          • Baylor in Ireland
      • Student Spotlight
      • Local Scene
        • Small Businesses
        • Social Media
      • Arts and Entertainment
        • Art
        • Fashion
        • Food
        • Literature
        • Music
        • Film and Television
    • Opinion
      • Editorials
      • Points of View
      • Lariat Letters
    • Sports
      • March Madness 2025
      • Football
      • Basketball
        • Men’s Basketball
        • Women’s Basketball
      • Soccer
      • Baseball
      • Softball
      • Volleyball
      • Equestrian
      • Cross Country and Track & Field
      • Acrobatics & Tumbling
      • Tennis
      • Golf
      • Pro Sports
      • Sports Takes
      • Club Sports
    • Lariat TV News
    • Multimedia
      • Video Features
      • Podcasts
        • Don’t Feed the Bears
      • Slideshows
    • Advertising
    The Baylor Lariat
    Home»Opinion»Editorials

    Trump lies, we believe

    Baylor LariatBy Baylor LariatFebruary 6, 2018Updated:February 7, 2018 Editorials No Comments5 Mins Read
    Rewon Shimray | Cartoonist
    Share
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Email

    When the boy who cries wolf is the president, Americans form a distorted view of reality.

    President Donald Trump’s constant lying confuses the American conscience, which acts to further his agenda and diminish truth. Trump is misleading and consequently failing to guide the country when he proclaims false information as fact. We deserve to know the truth, but when our public officials fail to offer it, we should persist in defending the truth in everyday conversations.

    According to the New York Times, Trump has been cited lying in his State of the Union address and beyond, through his false statements and self-accreditation for phenomena a part of a broader movement outside of his efforts.

    He has falsely described the conditions required for someone to be allowed to enter into the U.S. through the green card lottery program and family-based immigration visas, according to the New York Times. In his State of the Union address, Trump said the visa lottery “randomly hands out green cards without any regard for skill, merit or the safety of our people.” In contrast, ThinkProgress reported that after being randomly selected, individuals must undergo multiple security checks, interviews, and meet the minimum requirements of either a high school education or two years of work experience. Family members of the lottery winner must also go through the process to be approved as “derivatives” of the selected.

    Trump has declared his tax cuts to be the largest in history. However, CNN reported more significant tax cuts by former presidents Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson.

    He took full credit for the collapse of the Islamic State caliphate in Syria and Iraq in an interview with The Spectator, though it was actually a continuance of work done by former President Barack Obama, as reported by the New York Times.

    The New York Times also reported that although Trump boasted an increase in employment rates, especially among African-Americans, these improvements were already in progress before he took office.

    Trump has claimed “serious voter fraud” in Virginia, New Hampshire, and California without any evidence, PolitiFact reports.

    PolitiFact reports 69 percent of Trump’s statements to be mostly or completely false and only four percent to be true. When a political leader lies at such a high frequency, they diminish trust between themselves and citizens.

    The leader-member exchange model, reported on by Psychology Today, shows that a productive relationship between members and leaders requires trust. Trust empowers feelings of connectedness. Psychology Today goes on to find that “When people in positions of power lie, you not only become disaffected with them, but you become disaffected with the institutions they represent.”

    In essence, Trump’s lies reap and cultivate an image of government that people are less engaged in and begin to reject.

    Incessant lying not only deteriorates citizens’ motivation to externally engage in government, but also distorts citizens’ internal understanding of ongoing policy.

    Newsweek reports that Americans whose pre-existing political views are supported by Trump’s lies are more likely to accept his words as truth because of a phenomena called motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning explains people’s subconscious tendency to internalize false information if it aligns with their existing beliefs.

    Trump’s lies increase the amount of people that believe in his false information. People who hold views in conflict with Trump’s statements are also subject to falling for this alternate version of reality.

    Politico referenced a study by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert in his work “How Mental Systems Believe,” in which he analyzes the way people view the world.

    Gilbert said the first step someone takes to understand the world is to accepting everything as true. It’s an instinct to take input for its worth in the very first moment you hear it. It is not until after automatically considering the statement as valid that the brain begins to intentionally analyze the statement.

    Politico reported that the brain is unable to process a constant amount of lies, because it will reach a brink of “cognitive overload.”

    Through Trump’s constant lying, Americans lose the psychological endurance to sort through which of his statements are true or false, and accept them as true by default.

    His repetitive rhetoric additionally works to depict lies as truth. Wired described the “illusory truth effect,” which theorizes that the repetition of false statements decreases the brain’s ability to recognize it as such. According to Wired, “The effect works because when people attempt to assess truth they rely on two things: whether the information jibes with their understanding, and whether it feels familiar.”

    The brain assesses truth by comparing new information to past understanding, deliberating over which one is more trustworthy or credible. What happens when false information is repeated is that the repeated lies meld with past knowledge. As Wired explains, “familiarity can trump rationality.”

    Ultimately, Trump prompts a false sense of reality for all parties, which is detrimental to the individual, democratic opinions of citizens. Americans are entitled to the truth, and the president should not be the obstacle that keeps them from understanding it.

    We need to demand integrity from our leaders, but during the absence of honesty in this administration, it is our responsibility to combat government-sourced lies with individually-found truths.

    Sources such as the nonpartisan FactCheck.Org, Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact.Com and nonprofit Associated Press News provide fact checks on politicians’ public statements.

    By initiating and prompting conversations that speak truth into current events, we can balance and outweigh the feedback coming from the White House, and promote a more accurate public understanding.

    Baylor Lariat
    • Website

    Keep Reading

    Baylor community unites in flash flood relief efforts

    Baylor rescinds LGBTQIA+ inclusion research grant after backlash

    Students react to emergency alert following campus lockdown

    Baylor shelter-in-place lifted following police pursuit of robbery suspects

    Baylor graduate charged after killing cats with pellet gun, hanging bodies over utility lines

    Baylor Football’s Alex Foster dies at 18

    Add A Comment

    Comments are closed.

    Recent Posts
    • Baylor community unites in flash flood relief efforts July 9, 2025
    • Baylor rescinds LGBTQIA+ inclusion research grant after backlash July 9, 2025
    About

    The award-winning student newspaper of Baylor University since 1900.

    Articles, photos, and other works by staff of The Baylor Lariat are Copyright © Baylor® University. All rights reserved.

    Subscribe to the Morning Buzz

    Get the latest Lariat News by just Clicking Subscribe!

    Follow the Live Coverage
    Tweets by @bulariat

    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram YouTube LinkedIn
    • Featured
    • News
    • Sports
    • Opinion
    • Arts and Life
    © 2025 ThemeSphere. Designed by ThemeSphere.

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.