“I hate the children being taken away. The Democrats have to change their law — that’s their law.”
—Donald Trump, June 15

That Donald Trump is a prolific liar is beyond dispute. That he is the most mendacious president in American history is a matter of record.

What Mr. Trump claimed last week about a Democratic law that requires babies be taken away from their asylum-seeking mothers at the border is a lie he has oft repeated.

There is no such law. It’s Trump’s policy, and his attorney general quoted the Christian Bible to defend their policy.

The nonpartisan group, PolitiFact, has investigated 570 claims made by President Trump. Sixty-eight percent were mostly false (124), false (182) or pants on fire lies (83).

Trump tells the truth just five percent of the time. Ninety-five percent he does not. Donald J. Trump makes Richard M. Nixon seem saintly.

Yet despite his record of deceit, Trump is adulated by most Christian conservatives. According to a March poll, 75 percent of white evangelicals have a positive opinion of the president.

The Bible is unequivocal in its condemnation of liars. It’s not just the Ninth Commandment — “Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor” — where lying is damned.

Proverbs 12:22 proclaims, “Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord.” Proverbs 19:9 says “a false witness will not go unpunished, and he who breathes out lies will perish.”

Revelation 21:8 vows that “liars … will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur.”

James 3:14 may have been written specifically for this president: “… do not boast and be false to the truth.”

At the very least, it’s strange that so many Bible boosters fail to find fault with the president’s frequent falsehoods.

Here are a few of his recent whoppers:

On June 6, the president said, “People went out in their boats to watch the hurricane. That didn’t work out too well. That didn’t work out too well.”

Trump was referring to Hurricane Harvey in Texas. There was not a single case of anyone going out in a boat to watch the storm.

On June 5, President Trump unleashed a diatribe against the Philadelphia Eagles. Trump tweeted that he had disinvited the Super Bowl champions to the White House because, “Staying in the Locker Room for the playing of our National Anthem is as disrespectful to our country as kneeling.”

The Bible calls that sin calumny. No Eagles, in fact, knelt or remained in their locker room during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner.

On May 29, Trump told his touters in Tennessee, “We got $6 billion for opioid and getting rid of the scourge that’s taking over our country. And the numbers are way down.”

Way down? No. Just another lie.

The government’s most recent numbers show a rise in overdose deaths from the year before. For all opioids, including illegal and prescription drugs, deaths were up 15 percent. For synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, deaths were up 57 percent.

On May 24, while decrying the process of judges hearing immigration cases, Trump said “We have thousands of judges, and they need thousands of more judges. … Whoever heard of a system where you put people through trials?”

Trump was fabricating. We don’t have thousands of immigration judges. We have fewer than 400.

On May 29, the Concocter-in-Chief tweeted, “The Failing @nytimes quotes ‘a senior White House official,’ who doesn’t exist. … Use real people, not phony sources.”

This lie is strange, even for Trump. The person The New York Times quoted, but did not identify by name at the request of the White House, was Matthew Pottinger, the National Security Council’s senior director for Asian affairs.

Mr. Pottinger, at the White House, gave a background briefing on North Korea that day to more than a dozen media outlets, all confirming the accuracy of the New York Times story.

Also on May 29, Trump lied about his administration’s border policy, falsely repeating that “a horrible law” required children to be taken away from their parents. “… those are the bad laws that the Democrats gave us. We have to break up families.”

There is no law, only his dictum and his lies.

On May 23, Trump tweeted that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had affirmed that “the FBI was SPYING the Trump campaign.”

That is the exact opposite of what Mr. Clapper said when he was asked, “… was the FBI spying on Trump’s campaign?”

“No, they were not,” Clapper said. “The objective here was actually to protect the campaign by determining whether the Russians were infiltrating it and attempting to exert influence.”

On May 9, while lauding higher military spending, Trump lied again, “And, by the way — I know you don’t care about this — but that also includes raises for our military. First time in 10 years.”

B.S.

Military service members have received a pay increase every year on Jan. 1 since 1983. That year, they got their pay raise three months early.

This year’s increase, 2.4 percent, is notably smaller than the 3.9 percent pay hike given a decade ago under Barack Obama.    

No thinking person should be surprised that, as president, Donald Trump has been a habitual liar. His history of dishonesty goes back decades, long before he began lying about Obama’s birth certificate.

What is harder to figure is why Christian conservatives, who claim to take their Bible seriously, don’t care that they are backing a man who the Good Book says “will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur.”

Maybe they will join Trump for a swim?

— Rich Rifkin is a Davis resident; his column is published every other week. Reach him at Lxartist@yahoo.com