December 16, 2019: Trump Wins a Big Award for the Fifth Year in a Row

 

12/16/19: The votes are in and Donald J. Trump, without help from any foreign country, has won for a fifth year in succession. Politifact, a non-profit fact-checking site, recognizes him for telling the “Lie of the Year.”

This year, his winning whopper, oft-repeated, was saying that the whistleblower got his July 25 phone call “almost completely wrong.”

 

This was not Trump’s first win. In 2018 he shared the award with other liars on the right, after claiming that Parkland High School students who were calling for stricter gun control were “crisis actors.” 

The year before that he swept to victory by insisting that Russian meddling in the 2016 election was a “made up story,” a “witch hunt” and “a hoax.” 

That followed his epic win in 2016, when he repeatedly labeled any news story he didn’t like “fake news.” 

That win was part of what would become an impressive streak, since he also won in 2015, for his body of work (Politifact rated 76% of all of Candidate Trump’s claims partly false, false, or “pants-on-fire” false).

 

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IN A COURT FILING this week, lawyers for Purdue Pharma admitted that the Sackler family, which owns the company, had transferred at least $1.36 billion in profits to overseas accounts or affiliated companies. 

The parent company has filed for bankruptcy, to shield itself from 2,600 lawsuits. But the family will always have their memories. 

And at least $1.36 billion.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (4/21/22): Technically, Trump didn’t win in 2020, for “Lie of the Year,” but contributed mightily. The winning whopper was the “infodemic” surrounding the outbreak and spread of COVID-19. All the, “don’t worry, it’s only the flu,” “use hydroxychloroquine and you’ll be fine,” “don’t get the shots, your body will become magnetized,” lumped together, in what the site fact checkers called “junk science.” 

Still, Politifact wasn’t letting the president off the hook. “It was a symphony of counter narrative,” they noted, “and Trump was the conductor, if not the composer.” Trump and others contributed to the deaths of (soon to be) more than a million Americans. 

In 2021, the “Lie of the Year” went not to Trump, although “the election was stolen” lie seeded the field from which the winning lie bloomed. 

This time, the “Lie of the Year” was a collection of falsehoods related to the attack on Capitol Hill on January 6. For example, “it was really a false flag,” operation, or “FBI agents tricked the mob into going on a rampage,” or the people who attacked were really no worse than a group of ordinary tourists.