Transcript

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DONALD JOHN TRUMP: As President of the United States.

BARONESS FOOKES: Maybe people are more used to hearing or seeing people lying because we have the example over the Atlantic of President Trump. But I’m not even sure whether he knows that he’s lying or not. I mean, I’ve always taken the view that it is deliberate. But I’m not too sure whether with Trump whether he realises what he’s saying is the truth or not. I think he’s almost gone past it. I’m not a psychologist. But I think it would be very interesting to have somebody look at the state of mind which produces the effects that President Trump does.

NICK DUFFELL: And there is just so much information around. And you could see this with the confidence of, say, the way Donald Trump uses his lies to say, well, this truth is as good as any other truth. This is my truth. This could be fake news. You sort it out.

DONALD JOHN TRUMP: This is fake news put out by the media.

ASA BENNETT: But when you take the row over Trump’s inauguration, that very much was an early preview of what we’re about to see with the presidency itself, a constant rolling battle with the media in which those media rounds would distract from the substance of what was happening.

TONY THORNE: Trump’s associates actually doctored the photos, cropped them, so that they only showed the thick crowds at one end of the square, whereas Obama had filled the square. So that there’s incontrovertible documentary evidence. And still Donald Trump continued to insist that he’d drawn a bigger crowd.

ASA BENNETT: And so he was able to use the bully pulpit of the presidency to assert that actually, as his press Secretary ended up telling reporters, been the largest audience ever, period.

TONY THORNE: He knows that his hard core, his core supporters are not going to worry really whether it’s true or not. And that they will accept at face value anything he says, specifically this.

BARONESS FOOKES: I suppose one of the later ones was on the state visit when he claimed that, if we had a trade deal with America, with the United States, then the National Health Service would be included. The very next day, he said, oh, no, it wouldn’t be. Now, is that a lie or what is it? I mean, it gets almost beyond belief.

TONY THORNE: In fact, and I can’t judge the truth of this of course, but The Washington Post and other US journalists have tried to count the number of lies that they claim that Donald Trump has told since he took office. And the figure in April this year 2019 was 10,000.

BARONESS FOOKES: I know some people will compare President Trump with Boris Johnson in as much as they appear to say some contradictory things. I think there is a very vast difference between them, even though they appear to be friends. I think the trouble with Boris is that he gets carried away in a fit of exuberance and says something which perhaps he doesn’t really mean and will retract or amend at a later stage. Now, whether that is lying, I think is a grey area.

BORIS JOHNSON: Like some slumbering giant, we are going to rise and ping off the guy ropes of self-doubt.

TONY THORNE: And this goes right back, and perhaps is to some extent provable to his record when he was The Daily Telegraph correspondent in Brussels and he made up stories. He made up ludicrous stories about the bureaucracy of the European Union and their crazy pronouncements.

Some of these stories, they weren’t all attributed to Johnson, but were later repeated particularly in The Daily Mail about the idea that bananas would have to be straightened, that cows would have to wear pampers, and that Bombay mix would no longer be allowed to be called Bombay mix because it was a British imperial name, would have to be renamed. This was all nonsense.

ASA BENNETT: Well, certainly cynicism is very deeply embedded in the national psyche. And voters elsewhere around the world feel this like in the US. When it’s a distrust, not just of the political class, but also of establishment, figures, officials, and so this is why you see the BBC has been widely distrusted by some, even I, as part The Telegraph, will be distrusted by some people on Twitter and social media. This is why you have people going to alternative media outlets. They describe and decry the MSM, the mainstream media for peddling what they say is fake news, establishment narratives.

SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: The question is the amendment be agreed to. As many as of that opinion will say, content.

AUDIENCE: Content.

SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: Contrary, not content.

BARONESS FOOKES: Lying is stigmatised, I think, rightly because it shows distrust, how can you rely on somebody if they’re not telling you the truth. And so I think consistent lying, as I say, it unsettles people. It destroys integrity and trustworthiness in the system. So I think if it went on for too much, you could start to degrade the entire system. And I think that is why it’s so important.

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