Fact-checkers have made their careers tracking the lies of Donald Trump. During his presidential tenure alone, he recorded 30,573 — many of which he repeated in his return to cable television at a CNN town hall on Wednesday, including his lie that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. But meanwhile, another meter has been running. Let’s call it the betrayal count — and although there’s no official total, there’s little doubt it is, as Trump himself would say, yuge.
He cheated on his first wife, Ivana, with model Marla Maples, then married Maples and — according to a New York federal jury — sexually abused columnist E. Jean Carroll in a Bergdorf-Goodman dressing room, which recently cost him $5 million. A decade later, when married to his third wife, Melania, he allegedly had a one-night stand with porn star Stormy Daniels and used campaign funds to pay her hush money — a move that led to the first indictment of a former president on criminal charges in history. Throughout his business career, he’s left everyone from construction workers to his own lawyers out in the cold, awaiting payment — not to mention the students of Trump University. Not even his own cabinet was safe from Trump’s betrayal — just ask Jim Mattis. Or Jeff Sessions. Or Elaine Chao. Better yet, ask Mike Pence, who Trump made the target of a violent mob when he wiped his feet on his oath of office on Jan. 6.
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