On Getting Caught Lying

What do you do when you get caught lying?  We know what children frequently do.  They tell another lie to cover the first.  What then to most parents do?  They punish their offspring so that they don’t do it again.  

So what happens when adults lie?  Do they get punished?  And who does the punishing?  To judge from recent events, in many cases nothing happens.  The liars tell more lies, while their allies forgive them for whatever untruths they have told.

For years, we were informed that president Trump is a liar.  Although he insisted that he did not collude with the Russians to win the election, his political foes claimed that this was the biggest lie of all.  They accused him of treason and selling out to an enemy.

Now that the Mueller report is in, the tables have turned.  Quite unexpectedly Trump was found innocent of collusion.  Over a dozen lawyers, who were Democratic partisans, found no evidence of treachery. This hit like a bombshell.   Liberals had been expecting vindication.  They expected Trump to fall from power.

For years, those on the left had been cataloguing Trump’s wrongdoings. Virtually every day TV pundits cited undisputable proof of his guilt.  Similarly, in households across the nation ordinary Americans awaited an opportunity to impeach a hated adversary.

Then boom—the proof was gone.  Now folks who had been peddling facts that were not facts had egg on their faces. The politicians, in particular, who assured their partisans that they had the goods on the fool in the White House, were exposed as having overpromised.

What to do?  The politicians and media stars were caught with their pants down.  This was disconcerting.  At first, they literally did not know what to say.  They believed their own lies.  Because they repeated these falsehoods so often, they too thought they were true.

After a short while, they recovered and sought to change the subject. For a couple of days, all they would talk about was health care.  This pivot, however, did not work.  The elephant in the room would not disappear.  As a result, these newly exposed liars did that liars often do—they counterattacked.

One way to do this was to villainize the person who revealed their dishonesty.  Suddenly the Attorney General was a liar.  William Barr had clearly misrepresented what was in the Mueller report. Then he refused to release the document in order to cover up his deceitfulness.

There was no evidence to support any of these charges, but all at once they were on the lips of every Democrat.  Their strategy was evidently to flood the airways with this accusation, thereby putting Republicans on the defensive.  If conservatives needed to protect themselves, they would have to back off publicizing liberal duplicity.

The same tactic was on display with demands that Barr instantly put out the full Mueller text.  No time would be allowed for him to make legal redactions.  Once again the idea was to distort the truth to make it appear that those who unmasked the actual lies were the bad guys.

Lies could also be denied simply by repeating them.  This was the approach taken by Adam Schiff.  For years, he claimed to have irrefutable evidence of collusion.  Now that this had been disproven, what did he do?  Answer: he again claimed to have irrefutable evidence of collusion. Moreover, just as before, he did so without presenting it.

Liars can be brazen.  They know that those who want to believe their lies may continue to do so despite tons of evidence to the contrary.  People can fool themselves.  Some people still believe the world is flat.  Others are sure that Elvis Presley is alive.

These ultra-partisans cannot be convinced.  If there were tapes of Trump telling Putin to go to blazes, these would be dismissed as doctored.  If Schiff signed a confession that he invented his accusations, it would be scorned as a product of coercion.

So please, when lies are exposed as lies, the liars should be condemned as liars.  This may be hard to swallow if you are a committed partisan.  But if the truth is not accepted as the truth, we all suffer. We might be able to get by for a little while, but if we build our lives on them, the foundation eventually crumbles and we perish.

This is a truth that no amount of wishful thinking can wipe away.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus

Kennesaw State University