Policy Staging and Lying in Politics Essay Example

It is true when they say "politics is a dirty game." As human beings, it is an innate nature within us to lie. We lie about all things and try to hide the lies by making facts and policies that are also untrue. Politicians are a special type of liars that exist among us. Lies and untruths have been taken to be justifiable and necessary tools for a politician. In the end, it puts to question the dignity of the politician especially on the platform of bringing necessary change and salvation to the citizenry. The politicians not only inject untruths and lies about their opponents during the campaign period, but they also continue with their vein of lies after elections exaggerating facts and policies and using the same to bolster rhetoric claims. It means that politics in this day and age cannot exist without lies (Wolin 123). The purpose of this paper is to identify how politicians stage policies and lie to advance their selfish agendas with a focus on US President Donald J. Trump.

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Hannah Arendt contempt for Richard Nixon's regime and its efforts to deny in word and thought whichever the case and fit their reality into their theory. This is what politics aims at doing. The electorate and the citizenry are a gullible lot that can be moved to tears or anger by adding emotion to an issue without as much as questioning the truthfulness of the issue. Politics and politicians have understood this ploy and have used them incessantly to ensure that they are able to pass policies and legislation through lies, exaggeration, and intimidation (Arendt 13).

Politicians have contended to defend their use of lies in many aspects of society as a way of ensuring that they safeguard the people and protect them. Arendt (14) further contends that even though we may refuse to ask ourselves whether life is worth living especially in a world that has been deprived of justice and freedom, it may not also be worth living in a world that follows the political idea of truth. Indeed, all through history, the seekers of truth, as well as the truth tellers, have always known of the risk that comes with the work they do. It is common to find that these individuals are covered with ridicule and are looked down upon. On the other hand, another who forces the citizenry to take him seriously by demystifying falsehood and lies was putting his life in danger. The survivor and the one who many follow is he/she who puts forth an issue and adds a more colorful description about the issue that is most of the time false of driving the point home. He/she further offers a solution and is seen as a savior by the people he/she represents. This is a simple description of politics and how it plays out many times all over the world (Arendt 15).

America as a nation is in a period where the current administration does not care and has shown immeasurable and unprecedented disregard for the truth or the notion of truth. In fact, the current president has borne the tag as being the strangest in all of America's 242 years. The 45th president, Donald J. Trump, and his administration have orchestrated so many lies and untruths, yet they are only in their second year since taking the reins. Worse still, it is not clear whether he really won the presidential elections or he stole them according to various investigations and reports linking him with the Russia who are said to have hacked the US elections and handed President Trump the victory. It is unfair to cast a bad image on the current president as he has only inherited this characteristic of politicians and presidents from either side of the political divide that have perpetrated lies all through history. However, the current president is on a roll if lies are anything to go by and Americans are watching with baited breath hoping that he does not take the country down with his lies and untruths (Pfifner 117).

The president and his administration started lying right after his inauguration to the office. The White House Press Secretary at the time Sean Spicer claimed that the mammoth crowd during Trump's inauguration was the largest ever to witness an inauguration. Indeed, this was a huge lie considering that they were trying to make sense of what President Trump had said earlier, that he would get a record-setting turnout for his inauguration which he did not. In fact, his predecessor, former president Barrack Obama may well hold that title. Indeed, rather than admitting defeat, Trump's administration went on to justify that the crowd was large and could have been larger had various factors had happened differently. For instance, they stated that the crowd could have been bigger had the weather been nicer. These are some of the lies associated with politics (Bartolucci 135).

President Trump and his administration have an ilk of exaggerating particular issues, making and twisting facts about the issues, and then conjuring and asserting his reality that will aid in formulating a policy to fix these issues. There are many instances where these practices have come out clearly, and this paper will present a few of these with the aim of better understanding the issue of policy staging and how it is used to dupe the electorate into passing unnecessary policies(Bartolucci 129-135).

The issue of illegal voting and voter fraud have been on the president's mouth ever since his election in November 2016. President Trump has claimed incessantly that the issue of illegal voting poses a grave threat to the nation's democracy. Indeed, the president stated that had it not been for millions of illegal immigrants posing as voters during the 2016 elections, he could have won the popular vote. To that effect, he went further to institute a Voter Integrity Commission to investigate the whole issue of illegal voting. However, academic research done on this topic has given a broad consensus that the whole idea and notion that electoral outcome and democracy is affected by voter fraud and illegal voting is all but a myth. The biggest issue about voting has, however, been identified as voter suppression (Pfiffner 43-52).

The biggest issue with Trump's rant about illegal voting was that he did not have any evidence or cite any study or article to substantiate his claim. The claims can be traced to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones Facebook post where he wrote that three million votes during the November 2016 elections were cast by illegal aliens. This he states was according to Greg Phillips of VoteFraud.org. However, it was found that the claims were marred with inconsistencies and would not be trusted. Trump took this simple runt on Facebook and answered on his Twitter handle on January 2017 by tweeting a response to Phillips claim giving support. However, there has not been any evidence to the claims although the president is still discussing the whole issue to the extent of instituting the Voter Integrity Commission and misusing the taxpayer's money(Pfiffner 44-49).

The President has been vocal about many issues not hiding his disgust and hatred of certain aspects that are unpopular. The president has been disparaging Mexico all through his time before being president during his campaign and after taking office. He has championed the call to build a wall at the border of Mexico to keep the Mexicans off calling them rapists and drug dealers. Indeed, from his campaign speech, he has repeatedly stated that the Mexicans were sending their worst to the USA whereas the best crop who are left in Mexico are helping their country beat the USA economically. Indeed, that is a racist, fascist statement if ever there is one. It means that all the immigrants who have crossed the border from Mexico into America moved to rape and sell drugs to the Americans on the other side of the border (Pfiffner 78). His statements have caused a huge uproar from many sides of the divide with human rights organizations, activists, and the Latino community protesting against the president's claims. The only good thing that can be gotten from this scenario is that the president has been consistent over the issue. He further made another claim that he would make Mexico pay for the wall he will build. How he will make this possible is something that is difficult to prove even in theory (Bartolucci 136).

The president used fallacy to get support for his agenda of building a wall. The idea of creating barriers between the US and the Mexican borders has been tried before albeit with little success. The Bush Administration tried to have a fence as well as immigration reforms. Indeed, the fence was put up covering over 600 miles of the border. Much of the fence was aimed at putting away vehicle traffic rather than pedestrian traffic. Trump's idea of building a wall was taking these ideas to another level. The practicality, as well as the need for the wall, are however not as much as the Trump administration alleges and claims. It will spend a huge amount of the taxpayers' money to have a wall going across more than a thousand miles (Pfiffner 71-89).

By closing the border, will the president have kept the-rapist and drug dealers from America? Will the immigration policy that he is fronting adamantly achieve the results he has always fought for? America itself is a nation of visitors and immigrants as no one person can claim ownership of the country. The Native tribes have been pushed into small conservancy lands. The president's wife is not originally from America but migrated when she was of age. To some extent, it seems that even though the president's immigration policy targets all immigrants particularly those from Africa, the Middle East, and South America, he seems to have a personal vendetta against the Mexicans especially going with his description that is regrettable. Even with that, the president seems to have struck a nerve with a good number of legislators as well as Americans who have supported him with his agenda.

It is clear that people are moved when an issue whether true or false is backed by claims founded or unfounded. President Trump recently imposed a ban on travel to the US from seven Muslim majority nations among many others. He also suspended the entry to the country by Syrian refugees and a total ban of refugees going into America for 120 days after signing the executive order. Indeed, the president. This has been titled by many rather aptly the Muslim Ban. The terrorist attacks that have been happening all over the world largely orchestrated by Muslim terrorist organizations fueled these recent developments. However, there is a lot to be gotten from the whole handling of the situation since it leaves a lot of questions than answers (Bartolucci 127-138).

Indeed, the protection of the citizens of the United States is paramount and something that cannot be debated. The president has been vocal about immigrants as can be found from the beginning of this paper to this point as all of the issues touch on foreigners and their access and entry into America. The Muslim nation and Islam, in particular, has been a target of the Trump administration. Even as the protection of the citizenry is of paramount importance, targeting particular areas of the world based on religious discrimination is something that should be outlawed. Indeed, the whole executive order has been termed to be illegal and unconstitutional. Indeed, the president had at some point retweeted an inflammatory anti-Muslim video that had first been posted by Britain First. Britain First is a right extremist group that fueled the debate (Bartolucci 144-146).

Conclusion

Indeed, people wanted to know the authenticity of the video and whether the video was true or whether it was fabricated. The US press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders question to the authenticity of the video was that it did not matter and that the whole video showed the existence of a larger problem than people thi...