Wanted: A president who tells the truth

The wonderful thing about America is that almost anyone can grow up to become president. The reality is that only some people should.

The Constitution doesn’t demand much from the person who wants to be considered the most powerful leader on the planet. A president must be at least 35 years old, born in the United States and a resident for at least 14 years. That’s it. Voters decide what else it takes to qualify for the job.

The checklist should include an even temperament. The president commands the world’s most powerful military force, including nuclear weapons. Presidents don’t have to ask for anyone’s permission to order a launch. It is their decision and theirs alone.

A president should be free of emotional and psychological disorders. For example, they should not be pathological egoists. What’s good for the country must always come first.

They should be capable of empathy, diplomacy and all-around good judgment, and have the ability to work constructively in our two-party system. And, in case it comes up, no one should be able to run for the presidency from prison.

We could add much more to the checklist, but as the 2024 election cycle begins, one quality stands out. Presidents must be trustworthy.

There are few times, if any, in our history when truth has been more important. Misinformation and disinformation are the matches that light insurrection, violence, domestic terrorism, extreme partisanship, bigotry, mass shootings and wild conspiracy theories. Disinformation has created distrust in the electoral system, itself a threat to democracy.

There has never been a time when disinformation has been able to spread so quickly. Mark Twain gets credit for pointing out, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” But that might be untrue, too. Several notable people have made the same point. For example, Jonathan Swift wrote in 1710, “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after.” By the time truth catches up, it’s too late, Swift said: The lie has had its effect.

None of our forebears imagined how rapidly lies travel today.

Donald Trump’s irrepressible lying should immediately disqualify him from another term as president. The Washington Post tracked his lies during his four years in office and counted nearly 30,600 false or misleading statements. He is an unapologetic and irredeemable fabricator. Presidential historian Michael Beschloss says, “I have never seen a president in American history who has lied so continuously and so outrageously as Donald Trump, period.“

Because truth and trustworthiness are so important, it’s disappointing that Trump’s principal opponent for the Republican nomination, at least for now, is another man the American people can’t trust. As soon as he stepped on the national stage, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis employed the “illusory truth effect,” where a politician repeats a false claim over and over again until people believe it’s true. DeSantis’s lie is that he’s freedom’s champion. He is not.

Under his leadership, he says, Florida is “on the front lines of freedom” and has become a “citadel of freedom,” “freedom’s linchpin” and “freedom’s vanguard.” He has written a book titled “The Courage to be Free” and promoted his budget as the “Framework for Freedom.” “Everything he’s doing, he boasts, is about freedom,” points out Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic. But “DeSantis’s idea of freedom, for a lot of Floridians, looks more like chains: women seeking reproductive freedom, transgender children, school librarians, academics who dare to cross the whiff-of-1984 lines he and his legislature have drawn, and anybody who is sympathetic to any of those groups. DeSantis loves freedom—for people who love DeSantis.”

DeSantis claims Florida is “the place where woke goes to die.” Instead, it’s where authoritarianism lives.

A traditional Republican wants the government to stay out of people’s business. But DeSantis has produced a nanny state where his government dictates what books people should read, what’s taught in schools, what rights women have over their bodies, what advice investment advisers are allowed to give to their clients and what Mickey Mouse can say and do.

He has created an environment in which a complaint from one parent just persuaded an elementary school to keep students from reading “The Hill We Climb,” the inspirational poem delivered at President Biden’s inauguration by American youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman. The parent complained the poem “is not educational and have indirectly [sic] hate messages,” while misidentifying Oprah Winfrey as the poem’s author. The complaint was filed just a week after DeSantis signed a law ordering schools to take books off shelves within five days after a parental complaint. School officials then determine whether the book should be banned permanently.

Meanwhile, as DeSantis poses as commandant of America’s cultural wars, Florida “continues to languish toward the bottom of state rankings assessing the quality of health care, school funding, long-term eldercare, and other areas key to a successful society,” according to TIME magazine.

President Joe Biden isn’t blameless in the truth department. CNN reported that Biden made several false claims during his first year as president, primarily during ad-libs. But he also made “multiple false claims about important policy matters.”

“Biden never came close to making a dozen false claims in a single speech, let alone five dozen false claims in one address, as Trump once did,” CNN’s fact checker concluded. “In fact, the total number of Biden false claims so far is in the dozens, while Trump delivered well over 1,000 total false claims in his own first year and more than 3,000 the next year. So Biden is no Trump. With that said, dozens of false claims from the president of the United States is not nothing.”

Of all the qualities we need in a president today, none is more important than trust. The nation is starving for it.

William Becker is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project (PCAP), a nonpartisan climate policy think tank unaffiliated with the White House. He is a former senior official at the U.S. Department of Energy and the author of several reports and books, including “100-Day Action Plan to Save the Planet” and “The Creeks Will Rise: People Co-Existing with Floods.”