The Anatomy of a Trump Lie
All Trump lies begin with a kernel of truth; but when fully formed have mutated into something unrecognizable.
Take this quote from the Speech on Tuesday Night:
“The Panama Canal was built by Americans for Americans, not for others, but others could use it. But it was built at tremendous cost of American blood and treasure — 38,000 workers died building the Panama Canal. They died of malaria. They died of snake bites and mosquitoes — not a nice place to work. They paid them very highly to go there, knowing there was a 25 percent chance that they would die. The most expensive project also that was ever built in our country's history, if you bring it up to modern-day costs.”
Here is how the lie was transmogrified.
Claim that the Panama Canal was strictly an American project, funded by the government and built by Americans.
In fact, the Panama Canal was begun by the French between 1881 and 1889. The US took over construction in 1904 and completed the initial project by 1911. The most recent $6 billion dollar expansion will be completed in the next few years, paid for by Panama.
Multiple historical reviews of the building of the canal list deaths of between 25,000 and 29,000. But this number is not high enough for Mr. Trump. He inflates it to 38,000. This is what he calls “truthful hyperbole” in “The Art of the Deal.” For him, raising the number to a higher number, like telling a prospective buyer of a condo, that there are only 5 left, when there are actually 100 left, is not lying, it is just better marketing.
We can expect that sometime shortly, the number will become “38,000 or as much as 50,000; nobody really knows.”
But the real number is really closer to 25,000.
Then, he implies (but he can claim that he didn’t actually say it) that the US lost those 38,000 lives.
This, again is just a flat out lie. 22,000 of the deaths occurred during the French project, most from malaria, of which only 5,000 were French citizens.
During the US construction project, between 5,000-6,000 people died. But the vast majority of those were citizens from Barbados.
So, the claim Mr. Trump made during his speech, intended to convince his followers that the US paid for the entire construction of the canal and that 38,000 Americans died during that construction was based on the actual facts that the US played an important part in the construction of the canal along with the French and the current Panamanians; that a few hundred Americans died, but that the vast majority of deaths occurred during the 19th century, when the US was NOT INVOLVED.
The truth has now been buried so far beneath the pile of lies heaped upon it, that people can claim that “no one really knows what happened.”