The Big Lie (s)

Someday, I feel certain that our grandchildren will be asked this question in their high school civics class.

“When referring to American presidential politics in the first quarter of this century, what do we mean by, ‘The Big Lie’?”

We are living through those times and are assaulted by little lies from the Trump White House every day of the week.

Many of them would have been big lies in normal times.

From delegitimizing the federal workforce, to inflating the qualifications of the cabinet, to signing multiple unconstitutional executive orders; any one of these lies would have had editors shouting “stop the presses” in pre-Trumpian times. But each lie is just another noodle in the mass of spaghetti that our unhinged leader has thrown against the wall starting at noon on January 20.

In the previous Trump Administration and in the Biden years, the President made fact checking a meaningless exercise and retired the record for “Pinocchio's” in the Washington Post. Although many of them will shock future generations, I will not recount the doozies here. We all lived through them, and it will not benefit our health to repeat the absurdities here.

I will mention the one lie that became a theme for four years. “ Joe Biden weaponized the US Department of Justice against the innocent former President.” The antidote to this lie was stated in two simple sentences by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. “There is an alternate explanation. The President was guilty of the crimes.”

But the answer to my imagined high school or college quiz for our grandchildren became complicated last week. Until last week, The Big Lie would clearly have been that the 2020 election was fixed, and that Donald Trump defeated Joe Biden on November 3, 2020.

When polling showed that Trump was in trouble in the late summer of 2020, the “fixed” narrative was born, and the false victory claim has been repeated thousands of times by Donald Trump right up till the present. It became the one question test for entry into MAGA world (“Who won the 2020 election?”) and continues as a big lie to this day.

But last week, another contestant for THE big lie entered the field.

On April 2, 2025, in a flag draped ceremony in the Rose Garden of the White House, Donald Trump declared that this was “Liberation Day”, our declaration of economic independence. and one of the most important days in American history. The center piece of this announcement was the imposition of tariffs on the nations of the world, based on a bizarre formula of current tariffs on American goods and nation-specific trade deficits.

As you know, this announcement was followed by the worst day of losses in the US stock market since the pandemic. Losses were measured in trillions of dollars and world markets all headed south. The days that followed were compared to the Great Depression and even the plumbing of the Bond market began to shiver.

Clearly risking a worldwide economic crisis, the President defiantly ignored reality.

I was reminded of the controversial protest anthem that Pete Seeger wrote during the Vietnam War. It was called “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” and while inspired by a true story of a 1942 Army training exercise in Louisiana gone wrong, it was clearly aimed at President Johnson’s unwillingness to turn from impending disaster in Vietnam. Seeger’s performance of the song on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was first censored by CBS, but later successfully performed with over 13 million Americans tuned in. It resulted in the network cancelling the weekly variety hour. The citizen uproar was immediate and pointed to as one of many factors in the avalanche that changed the course of American policy.

As day after day Trump said keep cool, relax, and don’t worry, I know what I’m doing, I heard Seeger’s voice:

Waist deep in the Big Muddy

And the big fool says to push on.

Waist deep in the Big Muddy

And the big fool says to push on.

Waist deep! Neck deep! Soon even a

Tall man’ll be over his head. we're

Waist deep in the Big Muddy!

And the big fool says to push on!

Then, just as quickly as Trump had put the tariffs in place and declared Liberation Day, he blinked. He choked. He reversed course. He announced (not in person, but on Truth Social...the most ironic name for any platform ever conceived by the mind of man) that he was delaying implementation of the tariffs for 90 days except for those imposed on China.

The decision was so sudden, so knee-jerk, so unplanned that it hit the news at the same time US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer was defending the tariffs in front of a House committee. Phones started buzzing and Jamieson’s staff leaned forward to inform him that his boss had just pulled the rug out from under him.

After an emergency White House meeting of the people who should have been in the room when the 90-day pause was decided, Scott Bessent went out and delivered BIG LIE 2.0.

Scott Bessent, the 79th Secretary of the Treasury of the United States stands apart from his cabinet colleagues as a person fully qualified to hold his important role for our country. With over 40 years' experience in the global investment business, solid academic credentials and the respect of colleagues and leaders throughout the world, he can legitimately sit in the chair once held by Hamilton, Morgenthau, Connally, and Baker.

We all know that in accepting the nomination he made one questionable decision in his career, and on Wednesday April 9th he made a second regrettable choice.

With a straight face he told the press that the reversal on the tariff decision “had been the President’s plan all along.”

Thus, Whopper Jr. was born.

Mr. Secretary, would you like the fries or the onion rings with that?

Everyone who comes into Donald Trump’s orbit eventually is soiled by the association and in an effort to maintain comity with the King, says something stunningly stupid. That was Scott Bessent’s moment.

Of one thing I am certain. In the years to come, our grandchildren will not be celebrating April 2 as Liberation Day.

I just hope they study hard enough to get their lie test correct.