If Trump has told more than 10,000 lies, why do news media quote him so much?

Cartoonist Jimmy Margulies reduces Attorney General William Barr to President Trump's middle finger -- a royal F.U. to the American people. Both have tried to cover up the damning conclusions of the Mueller Report, which laid out Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. See more at JimmyMargulies.com.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

HACKENSACK, N.J. -- Donald J. Trump is a cold, calculating liar who has shown contempt for the truth over his many decades in public life.

"The president of the United States has exceeded 10,000 false or misleading claims since his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017," The Washington Post's Fact Checker declared on Friday.

"Let that sink in for a moment," the newspaper said. "To be precise, that's 10,111 claims in 828 days, according to the Fact Checker's database tracking and analyzing all of Trump's suspect statements."

In the last 7 months, The Post said, "it's nearly 23 [false claims] a day."

Bald-faced lies

The newspaper's unwillingness to call the "suspect statements" what they are -- lies, pure and simple -- is bad enough.

But even worse is that none of its reporters or any reporter assigned to cover the president has had the courage to confront him, and demand:

"Mr. President, when are you going to stop lying to the American people?"

Instead, they continue to knock themselves out spreading all of the president's lies and lying Tweets around the world for the consumption of friend and foe alike.

'The Art of the Deal'

In July 2016, Tony Schwartz, co-author of the 1987 memoir, "Trump: The Art of the Deal," told this to an interviewer from PBS' Frontline documentary series:

"'Why does it matter whether the president of the United States tells the truth?' [Laughs.] Yeah, I mean, you didn't mean it this way, but it's a good question.

"In a civilized society, we operate on the assumption that what another person is saying to us is factual. If we lose that connection, we're in chaos.

"And I fully believe that Trump would pay as little attention to the truth as president as I observed he did 30 years ago when he was making deals to buy up property."