One of the first headlines to announce the downfall of a kingdom was

MENE, MENE, TEKEL and PARSIN

This is the infamous “handwriting on the wall” found in the Book of Daniel 5:24-28. The words refer to monetary units in Aramaic, used to represent God’s judgment of the kingdom as follows:

Mene, mene – God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end

Tekel – You have been weighed in the scales and found wanting

Peres – Your kingdom has been divided and given to the Medes and the Persians.

 The metaphor of the “scales” suggests an unscrupulous merchant who would falsify the weight of his goods to cheat the buyer. The scales would use weights in one pan to equal the weight of the product in the other.  If the weights were falsely labeled, the product would actually weigh less than advertised, and the buyer would be cheated.  The author of the Book of Daniel sets this announcement at a banquet, where King Nebuchadnezzar and his court were celebrating using the holy vessels of the Jewish Temple, taken as spoils in the capture of Judah. Desecration will not go unchallenged, the story suggests.

Donald Trump is a deal-maker who expects to take advantage of false weights in the balance. Without his tax returns there is not much to prove his monetary manipulations, but his employment of alternative facts and outright lies shows that he has talent for deception and manipulation. This, more than his inhumane policies and contempt for the weak, will eventually end with his kingdom severed from him. This is no prophecy, but based on the simple faith that false balances have ultimate consequences.

Presidents do  lie, but there are lies, damned lies and alternative facts. President Clinton lied about his illicit relationship with Monica Lewinsky. He did it for the same reason we all lie: to avoid humiliation and consequences. He did it for the same reason as Adam and Eve: the archetypal lie to escape punishment. As the story of the Fall implies, we are all party to it.

We are less likely to be involved in damned lies. Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon lied consistently about the carnage of the War in Vietnam.  The Pentagon Papers revealed systematic lying to the public in order to wage battle against Communism and later, when conscience told them to retreat, to protect their legacy against being the first American President to lose a war. These are damned lies, disguised as policy and masked by what government calls “classification” of information.  It may have an institutional justification, but “damned lies” nonetheless.

Then there are “alternative facts,” lies told to gain position and distort reality. These are the most cynical lies, because they are nothing but the opening gambit of a deal.  When Donald Trump claimed he had lost the popular vote from millions of illegal immigrants voting, he had no actual facts. He knew the Pew Study was nothing more than a discovery of outdated voting lists, at worst poor record-keeping. He knew there was not a trace of mass voter fraud in all the investigations of all the elections in America.

But President Trump wanted to curb voter access to the polls, to keep the poor and minorities from voting against his interests, and to justify his failure to win the popular vote.  It was unconscionable for a populist President to lose the popular vote, so he made the unsupported claim that voter fraud had cost him the vote.

Alternative facts are the lowest form of lying, because they are deliberate, they are strategic, and they are gratuitous.  The investigation of voter fraud will sow just enough doubt to keep citizens suspicious of future fraud.  And the President may walk back his claims of millions of fraudulent votes to a few thousand or claim he never made such a bold declaration in order to narrow the distance between alternative facts and known facts.  Because these lies are merely a negotiation with the truth.

In 1918 US Senator Hiram Warren Johnson is purported to have said: The first casualty when war comes is truth. No doubt this will be the legacy of the Trump administration. This deal-making with the truth very much simulates the false weights in the balance pan, the ones that make the product appear more substantial and more valuable than it really is.  It is deliberate, strategic and gratuitous. It is more than self-protective, more than expedient policy, it is more than a defensive posture. It is a diabolical scheme.

Like his Babylonian predecessor, President Trump will have his kingdom ripped from him, not for his contempt for global warming or his campaign against refugees, but for reckless manipulation of truth. The lies and the damned lies are part of the business of politics, but the frontal assault on vulnerable truth will eventually disqualify him, and his kingdom will be given to an administration that admits a little more fear of God.