Editorial: Lies upon lies -- Trump's biggest falsehoods can't be settled by defamation cases

The Central Park Five, whose harrowing ordeal is known to most, are suing Donald Trump for claiming, during his debate with Kamala Harris, that they had pleaded guilty to the 1989 rape of a white jogger in the park, who Trump also claimed, falsely, had died.

Boys at the time, they at first confessed and then recanted. The subject came up because Harris criticized Trump for taking out newspaper ads calling for a restoration of the death penalty shortly after the horrific attack, roiling the racial tension of the time.

The five plaintiffs seek to hold Trump accountable in a direct way for his untruths, which can only be done when there are specific people involved who are being lied about in a concrete manner. The verdicts against Trump in the defamation cases brought by writer E. Jean Carroll are some of the few instances where he’s been forced to face consequences for his false statements.

There are many lies that the former president tells that are damaging not only to individuals but to our society and our democracy. Chief among these is the big lie of his election fraud claims about 2020.

Whereas his other lies often seem off-the-cuff or simply geared to have him never appear wrong about anything, Trump’s tales of millions of noncitizens bussed in to vote; of nefarious election officials and shadowy “deep state” figures coordinating to cheat him of his victory, all serve to prepare him to make the claim that only his win would be legitimate and any loss would inherently not be so. His lawyers have even spuriously called this defamation lawsuit “election interference.” There is also the biggest lie of all, that he didn’t lose last time.

These lies erode confidence in democracy. Long after Trump is gone from the scene, either next month or in four years, we need to still be a nation that believes in the process.

The web of lies also serves to distract from the plain fact that it serves to lay the groundwork for another effort to interfere with the 2024 voting and counting.

Government bodies like the Georgia State Election Board have been actively working to muddy the electoral process with a clear bent towards giving Trump an opening to push his fraud claims should he not win, a view only bolstered by the fact that the former president himself has shouted them out for these efforts.

As to the Central Park Five, who prefer to be called the Exonerated Five, we don’t think Trump even particularly stopped to consider he was lying; the man simply doesn’t care much about the truth. They will now have their chance to make him answer for his words, a rarity for Trump.

Of course, Trump will have to answer in a sense for everything when the American public passes their collective verdict on him in two weeks. Some people will forgive his pronouncements, others never will. While most Americans see two real outcomes: Trump wins or Trump loses, the candidate only sees a victory for himself or that he was wrongly cheated. And that is not the truth.

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