Donald Trump says he is a victim of fabrications and lies – which is a bit rich

“People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular,’ Trump wrote in 1987. ‘I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration – and a very effective form of promotion’

Trump supporters react at a rally after he accuses people of 'fabricating' information about him (Reuters)

On the same day news leaked that special prosecutor Robert Mueller had convened a grand jury to help get to the bottom of allegations of collusion between Russia and Donald Trump’s campaign, the man himself lashed out at an event in West Virginia, calling them a “total fabrication” and “made up” by Democrats still sulking over their losses.

That would be bad. People in Washington, people with power, are not meant to make stuff up. Those responsible for smearing Trump would have some explaining to do, because regardless of how this all turns out, so much damage to his presidency will already have been done.

But will he deserve an apology? Maybe not. Because fabrication and spinning fables is his favourite form of communication. He is himself intimately acquainted with mendacity. The country sees this. A new Quinnipiac poll says 62 per cent of Americans think that Trump is “not honest”.

These bad habits have been festering inside him for years. Recall his musings about the usefulness of embellishment in his 1987 book, The Art of the Deal.

“People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular,” he wrote. “I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration – and a very effective form of promotion.”

This helps explain that first very big – if not very consequential – lie of the administration, perpetrated by the now-binned Sean Spicer. That’s the one about more people being on the National Mall to witness the inauguration than for any president in history. Any rabbit nibbling the wildernesses of empty lawn that day could have called BS on that.

Last week was a jewel box of fresh little fibs tumbling into the light. On Monday, Trump said he’d received a phone call from President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico congratulating him on improved immigration interdiction.

“Even the president of Mexico called me,” he told his own cabinet. “They said their southern border – very few people are coming because they know they’re not going to get through our border, which is the ultimate compliment.”

He similarly claimed in an off-the-record interview with the The Wall Street Journal that his widely panned speech to the Boy Scouts Jamboree had been a great hit with Scout leaders, because they too had phoned him to tell him so.

Neither claim was true, as the new press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was forced to admit. But you know, he was sort of telling the truth. He had spoken to Peña Nieto about borders in Germany at the G20. The Scout leaders had spoken to him at the jamboree itself. There were never any phone calls, that’s all.

“I wouldn’t say it was a lie. That’s a pretty bold accusation,” Sanders struggled under quizzing by reporters about her and Trump’s record of veracity. “The conversations took place; they just simply didn’t take place over a phone call.” Sanders, whose father Mike Huckabee was a Christian minister before a presidential candidate, went on: “I don't think it's appropriate to lie from the podium or any other place ... my job is to communicate the president's agenda.”

He did speak by phone, shortly after the inauguration, with Malcolm Turnbull, the Australian leader. At the time he raged at the media for suggesting it hadn’t gone well, calling it “fake news”. Now we have the transcript and, well, it was a car crash of a call. Even Fox News called him out.

“The media did not lie. We reported the truth,” top anchor Shepherd Smith told viewers. “Then President Trump misrepresented the truth, and not for the first time.”

A busy president can get confused. But what about that other bombshell last week from The Washington Post, that the statement released by Donald Jr after revelations of his meeting with a Russian lawyer had been dictated by pops – a statement that later turned out to be misleading?

It was left to Sanders to push back, but hardly effectively. “There's no inaccuracy in the statement,” she attempted, before adding: “The President weighed in as any father would, based on the limited information he had; this is all discussion of frankly no consequence.”

I wanted to see how that would play out to the rest of America on the main network evening news bulletins, as opposed to the endless of loop of bloviation on cable channels like CNN. The approach taken by CBS was especially harsh. First, viewers saw a clip of Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow flatly stating last month that the prez “didn't sign off on anything” and “wasn't involved” in the drafting of Junior’s statement.

Then the clip of Sanders saying that, well, yes, he had been involved. That was followed by a still picture of an especially gruff-looking Mueller, and the supposition that he would find the day’s developments most interesting.

Trump’s rise to political favour in the first place was fuelled by the most offensive fable of all – that President Barack Obama was hiding a birth certificate that proved he wasn’t an American. Meanwhile, his campaign was powered in part by assertions that Clinton hadn’t been careless but had knowingly committed a crime using her personal email server for government business – his supporters were still crying “lock her up” in West Virginia – and that she was personally culpable for the sacking of an American consular complex in Libya that left four Americans dead.

Trump has since tacked every which way on Clinton, depending on what suits the moment. Going after his own Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, recently Trump used his alleged failure to reopen an investigation into Clinton as a pretext for eventually firing him. Yet upon his election last November, he played grand magnanimity. “I don’t want to hurt the Clintons, I really don’t,” Trump told The New York Times. “She went through a lot and suffered greatly in many different ways, and I am not looking to hurt them at all. The campaign was vicious.”

After all this time, including months of investigation by the FBI, no evidence has come to light to warrant criminal prosecution of Clinton. And maybe nothing will come of Mueller’s Russia probe either, and Trump will turn out to have been a victim of “total fabrications” and “made-up” canards as he contends.

But he should know a thing or two about that, which is why not very many of us will feel sorry for him even then. Chickens coming home to roost, and all that.