“But you can’t make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can’t last.”—Ray Bradbury

ROLLING FORK—“Some people,” my mother was wont to say, “will tell a lie when the truth would do them better.” This, I find not only memorable but relevant today. And it is worth noting that she never even met Donald Trump.

The Washington Post, one of the newspapers that the 45th President of the United States loves most to hate, has for years now kept a fact-checked running tabulation of the false or misleading claims, the exaggerated numbers, unwarranted boasts and outright falsehoods emitted from the mouth or Twitter account of Donald Trump.

Almost unbelievably, as of Oct. 9, as the president neared his 1,000th day in office, that running total had reached a staggering 13,435. The President of the United States, the highest elected official in the country and until recently the leader of the free world, had either said or typed 13,435 of what ordinary folk not bound by some self-imposed journalistic limits, would call lies.

Even the mathematically challenged can pretty quickly cypher that’s an average of more than 13 lies a day and that’s not even the bad news. The bad news is he’s telling more now than ever before—averaging 22 a day in the last two months.

In addition to whatever else folks might argue about what he is, Donald J. Trump is demonstratively, undeniably a habitual, inveterate liar. We the people literally cannot, should not believe a word the man says and only the foolish among us do.

The Post actually assigns a statistically-minded woman to do nothing but keep track of the president’s lies (and pause a moment to just dwell upon that), and according to her, almost 20 percent of all those lies are about his most passionately embraced issue, immigration, with the majority of those tall tales being related to his perpetually propagated myth that his beloved 15th Century-quality border wall is being built. It isn’t. Congress refuses to pass funding for it and a federal judge has just blocked him from diverting money appropriated for other things to it.

According to the Post’s resident lie-counter, the subjects of trade, the economy and the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election each account for about 10 percent of the total body of falsehoods, the vast majority of which fall into the category of just telling the same lies over and over—“Mexico is going to pay for the wall,” and his economy is “the best in history,” as prime examples. Mexico, of course, never was nor will do any such thing and Fox News economists notwithstanding, Trump’s economy falls short of those in the administrations of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson, Bill Clinton and even Ulysses S. Grant, for that matter.

And while there may be compounding evidence for the proposition that Trump is mad as a hatter, his madness may not be without method. After all, not only did Adolph Hitler believe “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed,” but none other than John F. Kennedy echoed that sentiment: “No matter how big the lie, repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as truth.”

And that is exactly what Trump is doing. The newspaper’s “Fact Checker” database reveals that more than 350 times, most often via Twitter (20 percent of all the lies are delivered in that way), the president has repeated a variation of the same lie on at least three different occasions.

Telling the lie, then repeating it enough for it to be accepted as truth. Trump is effectively functioning as his own propaganda engine.

It is a strategy that has worked for him before and he is desperately hoping it will again in the current Ukraine furor—the source of the latest uptick in the lie quotient, more than 250 in the past two weeks. He’s repeatedly said the whistleblower’s account is “inaccurate,” when the White House release pseudo-transcript proves its accuracy and he continues to repeat the conspiracy theory that his possible Democratic challenger Joe Biden forced the resignation of a Ukrainian prosecutor to protect his son—a charge long ago proven bogus.

In fact, Trump’s ill-fated phone call to the then new Ukrainian president, one he repeatedly describes as “perfect,” has effectively done two things—led to the beginnings of impeachment in the House and caused the most people ever to look up the meaning of the Latin phrase “quid pro quo.”

It will only get worse from here on, perhaps even to the point of a nation’s reaching its turgidity point on lies. But until then we would do well to remember what Jonathan Swift observed quite a while back: “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over and the tale hath had its effect.”

Ray Mosby is editor and publisher of the Deer Creek Pilot in Rolling Fork