Lying in State
Why Presidents Lie - and Why Trump Is Worse
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Lying in State
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Narrated by:
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Sean Patrick Hopkins
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By:
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Eric Alterman
About this listen
This definitive history of presidential lying reveals how our standards for truthfulness have eroded - and why Trump's lies are especially dangerous.
If there's one thing we know about Donald Trump, it's that he lies. But he's by no means the first president to do so. In Lying in State, Eric Alterman asks how we ended up with such a pathologically dishonest commander in chief, showing that, from early on, the United States has persistently expanded its power and hegemony on the basis of presidential lies. He also reveals the cumulative effect of this deception - each lie a president tells makes it more acceptable for subsequent presidents to lie - and the media's complicity in spreading misinformation. Donald Trump, then, represents not an aberration but the culmination of an age-old trend.
Full of vivid historical examples and trenchant analysis, Lying in State is essential listening for anyone seeking to understand how we arrived in this age of alternative facts.
©2020 Eric Alterman (P)2020 Hachette AudioCritic Reviews
"Nation columnist Alterman delivers an administration-by-administration analysis of presidential deception from FDR to Donald Trump in this vigorously argued account... Alterman makes a strong case for the links between presidential dishonesty and the expansion of executive powers since WWII ... and for the media's culpability in failing to hold presidents to account." —Publishers Weekly
"In highly engaging prose, Eric Alterman shows how the power of the presidency corrupts both those with the best of intentions, and those with the worst. No one reading this provocative work of history will ever think of our mightiest heroes of state the same way again." —Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money
"An astounding and methodical inventory of presidential lying from George Washington to Donald Trump. Alterman shows how the strategic lying of past presidents about specific episodes of war, corruption and injustice has given way in the Trump administration to indiscriminate lying about everything. This is a cogently written, timely and profoundly troubling book for the new age of conspiracy theory, fake news and online disinformation. Democracy is in peril—and that's no lie." —Congressman Jamie Raskin, MD-8