Editorial: Donald Trump’s lies are an assault on American values

Follow @csteditorialsDonald Trump lies like the pope prays. He can scarcely pass a microphone without proclaiming another falsehood. When challenged, he doubles down on the old lie or invents a new one, usually both.

Last week, Trump pronounced that he now believes Barack Obama was born in the United States, putting to rest a fiction he had pushed for years. How kind of him to grant the president citizenship. But in the very same speech he threw out an equally bald lie, accusing Hillary Clinton of starting this whole stupid “birther” business to begin with.

Follow @csteditorialsWe could write an editorial every week listing Trump’s latest lies, and maybe we should. Certainly the media can’t give in to falsification fatigue and stop calling him out. But there are just so many.

This is a man who says that Hillary Clinton “invented” ISIS; that he opposed the Iraq war; that he watched “thousands and thousands” of people in Jersey City cheer as the World Trade Center fell on 9/11; that 81 percent of white murder victims are killed by blacks; that the Democratic presidential nomination was “rigged” against Bernie Sanders; that he didn’t know anything about David Duke; that he won most of the Trump University lawsuits; that Sen. John McCain has “done nothing to help the vets”; that his book “The Art of the Deal” was the No. 1 best-selling business book of all time.

All complete fabrications.

And long after Obama’s “long-form” birth certificate was made public in 2011, he kept up the drumbeat that Obama was born in Kenya. Do not believe his apologists, beginning by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, that he backed off after that. He did not. Trump lies and his enablers rewrite history — a kind of lie — to make the lies go away.

And let’s be honest: To say otherwise is to lie to yourself.

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