PRESIDENTIAL LICENCE
Playing a game that has served him well
Donald Trump has spent more than 40 years extravagantly and publicly lying to burnish his reputation and mislead the public, writes Timothy L O’Brien
Donald Trump’s ubiquitous spokeswoman, Kellyanne Conway, coined a new term in the new president’s first week. In an exchange about Inauguration Day turnout with NBC’s Chuck Todd, she called false White House claims of record-setting crowds "alternative facts". While the term is likely to become a signature catchphrase, forever to be associated with Trump, Conway, her boss and press secretary Sean Spicer are playing a White House game that is nothing new. Ron Ziegler, the late press secretary to president Richard Nixon, tried over four decades ago to characterise White House lies as something other than lies. Past falsehoods were "inoperative" during the Nixon administration, he explained, and corrections to the record simply became "operative". "The president refers to the fact that there is new material; therefore, this is the operative statement," Ziegler said at a media briefing in the early 1970s. "The others are inoperative." (Another Ziegler statement on secret White House tap...
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