Hillary more honest and trustworthy than Trump

Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast, via the Daily Beast

Any U.S. citizen who believes that Donald Trump is more honest and trustworthy than Hillary Clinton has not been following the trail of lies Trump leaves behind him at every exchange with a media representative or at one of his violence-prone rallies. Well, at least Nicholas Kristof, NY Times op-ed columnist, isn't buying Trump's fabrications; Kristof tells it like it is regarding Trumpism.

Here's an excerpt from Kristof's September 15, 2016 column:
 

One of the mental traps that we all fall into, journalists included, is to perceive politics through narratives.

President Gerald Ford had been a star football player, yet somehow we in the media developed a narrative of him as a klutz — so that every time he stumbled, a clip was on the evening news. Likewise, we in the media wrongly portrayed President Jimmy Carter as a bumbling lightweight, even as he tackled the toughest challenges, from recognizing China to returning the Panama Canal.

Then in 2000, we painted Al Gore as inauthentic and having a penchant for self-aggrandizing exaggerations, and the most memorable element of the presidential debates that year became not George W. Bush’s misstatements but Gore’s dramatic sighs.

I bring up this checkered track record because I wonder if once again our collective reporting isn’t fueling misperceptions.

A CNN/ORC poll this month found that by a margin of 15 percentage points, voters thought Donald Trump was “more honest and trustworthy” than Hillary Clinton. Let’s be frank: This public perception is completely at odds with all evidence.

On the PolitiFact website, 13 percent of Clinton’s statements that were checked were rated “false” or “pants on fire,” compared with 53 percent of Trump’s. Conversely, half of Clinton’s are rated “true” or “mostly true” compared to 15 percent of Trump statements.

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