A biographer of Donald Trump said the president deserves credit for the "audacity" of the lies that he has been telling his entire life during a Friday appearance with CNN's Anderson Cooper.
The segment began by focusing on credible reports that Trump has used the aliases John Miller and John Barron in efforts to deceive reporters. For analysis, Cooper brought on Michael D'Antonio, the Pulitzer prize winning author who wrote the 2016 book The Truth About Trump.
"This is just kind of bizarre that he would have done this," Cooper noted. "It shows the extent to which he wanted to be seen as being incredibly rich and getting his name in the paper and bragging about women he had been with."
"The blatant lying from citizen Trump, to where some of the buildings were located, goes beyond simply embellishment to outright fabrications," Cooper concluded.
"I guess this is how we get to a president who now told 2,000 lies during his time in office," the Trump biographer suggested.
"People will present him with the audio recordings and he will deny that it's him -- even after he admitted it's him," D'Antonio explained. "It's really impossible to follow and kind of crazy-making."
Cooper, for his part, had his own hypothesis concerning the intended audience of Trump's misrepresentations.
"It's interesting, though, because a lot of the lies he told in the past, and even nowadays, they require you to be an idiot," the "AC360" host observed. "They're sort of based on the idea that the person listening is just dumb and doesn't put the pieces together."
"You got to give the guy credit for audacity," D'Antonio argued. "He has incredible amounts of chutzpah -- and he is not even Jewish."
"As long as you're been profiling him, has he always been like this?" Cooper asked.
"Oh yes," the biographer answered. "This is Donald, really going back to his school days when he was a boy, he insisted to others that he had hit home runs he had never hit in ball games."
"He left the New York Military Academy declaring himself the greatest baseball player in New York state," he added. "And it went on and on and on. He was named the ladies man at a school that had no young women at it."
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