THIS week the world holds its breath. That’s because this week saw the inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the US. We are heading into uncharted waters, pundits warn. Who knows what Trump will do?
Well, one thing they can be sure of is that Trump will continue telling lies. Analysts say that Trump told 30,000 ‘mistruths’ during his last term in the White House. The fact that his vice-president is JD Vance, a Catholic, seems unlikely to slow his falsehood pace this time around.
Is this strangling of the truth by the US President a marker between the coming Trump era and the past Biden era? In terms of quantity of lies, Biden wasn’t in the same league as Trump. But Biden could produce the odd porky if needed.
He told some technical college students “I used to drive a tractor-trailer” and at a Mack trucks centre he claimed “I used to drive an 18-wheeler, man." A fact-check shows he did neither. He repeatedly talked about a long conversation with an old friend, an Amtrac train conductor. He couldn’t have, as the man was dead at the time. He repeatedly claimed to have travelled “17,000 miles” with Chinese President Xi Jinping, but actually never undertook this marathon journey. He claimed he had been arrested during a civil rights demonstration. Never happened, Joe. In August, he asked the rhetorical question “What interest do we have in Afghanistan at this point, with al Qaeda gone?” Al Qaeda wasn’t gone, as a Pentagon spokesman made clear the same day. When the US withdrew from Afghanistan, Biden claimed the idea of nation-building “never made any sense to me” – even though he had advocated that very thing several times as the start of the war in Afghanistan.
And there are lots of other examples. Both Biden and Trump are liars – It’s just that Trump does it on a massively bigger scale.
But sticks and stones etcetera. What any President, any leader, should be judged by is what he did. During Trump’s presidency, 135 US military personnel were killed. Looking back on his term in office, Biden claimed "I'm the only president this century that doesn't have any, this decade, that not any troops dying anywhere in the world.” In fact, 15 US soldiers were killed in combat during his term. Many fewer, but 15 grieving American families know Biden lied.
What we need to keep in mind is that guilt doesn’t just begin and end with the guy who shoots the bank cashier. The guy who procures the weapon and drives the getaway car is also a guilty party.
In the 467 days of Israel’s war on Gaza, 46,407 Palestinians were killed, 18,000 of them children. Yes, it was the work of the IDF, but it was the US and Joe Biden who gave $2.7 billion to Israel in 2020 alone. The US financed the weaponry that produced the rubble and dead babies and dead children and dead adults in the Gaza strip. In doing so, Biden was just following a path trodden by earlier US Presidents. But in Biden’s case we have seen the results of his bank-rolling on our screens every night: Corpses, weeping relatives, bloody and dead children.
I’m not saying that Trump won’t be responsible for further bloodshed – maybe even increased bloodshed if he fulfils his threat to make Canada the 51st state. But I am saying that Trump isn’t essentially different from other US Presidents. Clinton, Bush, Obama – they all have lied, they all have blood on their hands. The sight of Trump hugging the richest man in the world while other vastly rich men stand in line to bend the knee to the White House’s newest resident is stomach-churning and scary, but it’s not unique.
As someone once said, behind every successful business leader lies at least one major crime. Likewise, behind every US President lies a mound of corpses.
Yes, we need to buckle up for the coming Trump era. But we shouldn’t forget that his predecessor, Joe Biden, was a butcher.
