We've never had a president 'incapable of telling the truth,' says former Bill Clinton press secretary
The dishonesty of the Trump administration is unparalleled in American history, former White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart argued on CNN's Reliable Sources Sunday.
"This has never happened before," Lockhart said. "We've had great presidents; we've had terrible presidents, Republicans and Democrats; but we've never had anything like this — where we have a president who is incapable of telling the truth." Lockhart worked in the administration of former President Bill Clinton, who was impeached along party lines for perjury by the House of Representatives and acquitted by the Senate.
Lockhart may be right that Trump's average of 6.5 false or misleading public claims daily, per The Washington Post's count, is unique. Still, as Politico documents, presidents have long lied about everything from their age to their opponents' religion to what they knew and when they knew it.
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See Lockhart's comments in context below. Bonnie Kristian
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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