White lies matter in government

Let the record reflect that shortly before White House Communications Director Hope Hicks told a congressional committee this week that she had lied on behalf of the president, she swore an oath to tell the truth. So she probably was being truthful when she said that she sometimes wasn't. Truthful, that is.

It's kind of a shame to pick on Hope Hicks, though, for admitting what her boss won't. You don't ever hear Donald Trump concede that he hasn't told the truth, despite a record of prevarication that exceeds anything ever seen in national politics.

He insists he was "totally opposed" to the invasion of Iraq, despite recordings of him supporting the war.

He claimed to have the greatest Electoral College victory since Ronald Reagan, which would be true only if you don't count three of the four presidents between Reagan and Trump. His victory came, he said, even though at least 3 million people had voted illegally, which no election official anywhere in the country, from either party, agreed was true.

He insisted that Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower (he didn't), that "very few people" had been covered by Obamacare (20 million is few?), that his push against NATO had brought in "billions of dollars" (NATO members agreed to hike defense spending in 2014) and that "the Russia story is a total fabrication" (which it is not).

In fact, Trump said more than 2,000 things during his first year in office that were demonstrably false, according to The Washington Post's fact-checking team.

So against the presidential record of whoppers - which does not refer to Bill Clinton's relationship with Burger King - the fact that the fourth Trump White House communications director told what she called "white lies" is unsurprising. You may consider it inconsequential.

But it's not. Truth-telling matters in a democracy.

Lying in politics doesn't damage only the liar. In fact, Trump's outrageous lies (Biggest inaugural ever! Highest-taxed nation on Earth!) seem not to have cost him support from his strongest advocates. But democracy hinges on people making smart choices about their government, and those choices can't be fairly made if they're not based on a set of facts that we can all reasonably trust. Now every American and every world leader knows that what comes from the White House can't be believed from one day to the next. Restoring America's credibility will take a long time.

There's also a practical reason why people in roles like Hope Hicks' shouldn't lie: If an official spokeswoman doesn't tell the truth, citizens and the reporters who cover the White House on their behalf will try to find the truth through other channels. So when a press aide gets a reputation with reporters for being less than forthright, reporters will burrow deeper to find sources elsewhere who will share facts.

Trump says he hates officials who leak to the press, but he empowered them on Day 1, when he sent his first press secretary to the briefing room podium to insist that his inaugural crowds were a record size, which in turn led Kellyanne Conway to coin the term, "alternative facts."

I speak from experience. In my 20s, I spent four years as a press secretary to a member of Congress. Even at that level, you're tempted to fudge the facts a bit to make your boss look better to voters. But I got clued in from the get-go that in the long run, prevarication never works. If you don't respond truthfully to reporters' questions, they pretty soon turn elsewhere for answers.

Here, though, is the greatest problem with white lies: They make it easier to tell big lies.

Research by three British psychologists who partnered with an American business professor revealed that lying changes the amygdala, the portion of the brain that deals with emotion. They concluded: "The findings uncover a biological mechanism that supports a 'slippery slope': what begins as small acts of dishonesty can escalate into larger transgressions."

Why should our allies trust an American government led by a known liar? More dangerously, what might adversaries think?

This week Vladimir Putin said new "invincible" missiles can pierce any U.S. defenses. His claim was met with some skepticism, though, both because Russia showed no proof of successful tests and because Putin is prone to braggadocio.

As, of course, is Trump. This week, remember, the president bragged that he would run into a school during a shooting even if he didn't have a gun - a bold claim from a guy who got a draft deferment during the Vietnam War because of bone spurs.

At least Hope Hicks was brave enough to admit she lied. Maybe we should see it as just the latest example of somebody else taking a bullet for Donald Trump.

Rex Smith is editor of the Times Union. Share your thoughts at http://timesunion.com/rex_smith.

Rex Smith is editor of the Times Union. Share your thoughts at http://timesunion.com/rex_smith.