Trump’s ‘lies’ and Obama’s

Of all the lines of attack against Donald Trump, perhaps the most odd, in the current moment, is that the Republican presidential nominee is somehow uniquely challenged when it comes to telling the truth.

“Donald, I know you live in your own reality, but that is not the facts,” Hillary Clinton protested in the first presidential debate when Trump accurately accused her of flip-flopping on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.

The New York Times published a story about “A Week of Whoppers from Donald Trump.” A Washington Post column denounced “Trump’s Hitlerian disregard for the truth.”

At the risk of seeming backward looking, let’s examine two pivotal episodes involving the truthfulness, or the lack of it, of the current administration.

The first involves President Obama’s selling of his signature legislative achievement, the health-care legislation known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.

“If you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” Obama said. He said those words, or something very similar, at least 36 times. Type the phrase into Google, and the results include YouTube videos of him repeating the phrase in televised speech after speech.

As millions of Americans found out, the president’s promise was not true. For me, this went from an abstract issue to a personal sore point last month, when I got a letter in the mail from my health insurance company telling me, “We want to let you know that we will no longer offer this plan in 2017.”

MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, who advised the White House, declared that “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. … Call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever. Basically, that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”

If a businessman or businesswoman sold a product to customers as fraudulently as Obama sold the public and Congress on Obamacare, he or she would probably end up in jail. Yet somehow this isn’t much of an issue in this presidential campaign. Maybe that is because Trump is running against Clinton, not Obama. Maybe people figure the health-care law passed so long ago no one remembers.

But the “long ago” argument doesn’t seem to have prevented the press or the Clinton campaign from replaying Trump’s interactions with the 1996 Miss Universe over her weight issues.

Another case where Obama bent the truth in a significant way has to do with Syria. In August 2011, Obama said, “For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” In August 2012, Obama followed up by saying, “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.”

Yet Syria did use, and by many credible reports has continued to use, chemical weapons. Assad has remained in power. The United Nations estimates the death toll for the conflict at 400,000 and the number of refugees at 4.8 million, with another 6.5 million displaced within Syria.

Secretary of State Kerry in March of 2016 recognized an ongoing genocide in the areas of Syria and Iraq under control of the Islamic State.

Maybe Trump has no better policy solution in Syria than Obama does. But Obama’s “red line” and time-for-Assad-to-step-aside comments are right up there with “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan” in the department of presidential prevarication.

Indeed, if the Clinton camp is getting any traction with its attack on Trump’s truthfulness — a big “if,” to be sure — it may be because the Obama years taught us all way more than we wished we knew about the dangers of a president whose words are phony.

Ira Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com and author of “JFK: Conservative.” His column appears Sunday.