The Great Fabricator

Something remarkable happened, according to Donald Trump, when Donald Trump arrived at his campaign rally in Evansville, Indiana last week.

Nine “miners” greeted him backstage. They were “tough guys,” “seriously tough cookies,” men he wouldn’t want to fight. But eight of the nine were crying.

“Crying out of happiness,” Trump said. “Because they’re back.”

[...]

Trump flew from North Dakota to South Dakota. There, he repeated the story from eight days prior in Indiana, almost word for word, about how he had encountered nine men, eight of whom were crying.

But there was something odd about this version. This time the nine men were “steelworkers,” not miners, and the encounter happened “at the opening of one of the big plants for United States Steel,” not backstage at the Indiana rally.

  The Star

I wonder what it is with that ninth guy? Why isn't he crying?

All of Donald Trump’s lies, false claims and exaggerations, checked

By Trump’s telling, the waterworks began early in his presidency. In May 2017, he told CBS about what happened when he let “the head of a major, major company” visit the Oval Office.

“I said, ‘Have you been to the White House before?’ ‘Yes, 51 times.’ I said, ‘Oh good, so you’ve been to the Oval Office.’ ‘No, I was never brought to the Oval Office.’ I said, ‘Come on, I’ll bring you to the Oval Office.’ The person came into the Oval Office and started to cry,” he said. “This is a tough person, by the way. Came into the Oval Office and started to cry.”

In January 2018, Trump told an American Farm Bureau convention that farmers had approached him crying after he signed an executive order to ease an Obama-era water regulation many farmers opposed. “Men that were tough and strong, women that were tough and strong — they’d see me, they had tears coming down their eyes, because I gave them back their property, I gave them back their farms,” he said.

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For all his respectful mentions of supposed crying, Trump has also used crying as a weapon of shame in political attacks. When former staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman turned on him in August, he called her a “crazed, crying lowlife,” elaborating: “She begged me for a job, tears in her eyes.”

He has periodically referred to Democratic leader Chuck Schumer as “Cryin’ Chuck” and “Fake Tears Chuck” since Schumer choked up after Trump imposed his Muslim-focused travel ban in 2017. Attacking Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal for Blumenthal’s lies about serving in Vietnam, Trump claimed that Blumenthal “cried like a baby” when he was caught, though that did not happen either.

[...]

Trump told author Tim O’Brien for a 2005 biography: “I don’t believe in crying...when I see a man cry I view it as a weakness.”