During the 1960s and ’70s, the phrase “credibility gap” was used to describe the disconnect between what government officials said and what the public believed.

The phrase is usually associated with the Vietnam War and Watergate. But my baby boomer generation’s distrust of government began with the Warren Commission, the blue-ribbon committee that investigated the assassination of President John Kennedy.

Led by Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, the commission was supposed to reassure us that the Soviet Union was not involved. Unfortunately, their report was put together with so much hurry and confusion that it ended up spawning more conspiracy theories than it eliminated. 

We later learned that the commission was discouraged from pursuing leads that could have exposed dirty tricks and sloppy procedures at the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
 
Because the Warren Commission cut corners, many Americans did not believe its conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin, even though subsequent investigations showed it was probably the correct finding.

During the 1970s, a committee led by Idaho Sen. Frank Church cataloged the CIA’s dirty tricks. Although its purpose was to clear the air, the Church Committee’s reporting of government misdeeds, including efforts to assassinate foreign leaders, added to our skepticism. 

In any case, by the time Church got involved, the Vietnam War and President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal had institutionalized public distrust of government officials.

The recent public television series about the Vietnam War was a timely reminder of how our government distorts facts to build support for questionable wars.

Unfortunately, our political leaders have a history of misleading the public, dating back to our founding, when falsehoods were spread about the sex life of George Washington. One particularly virulent rumor claimed that in 1754 the then-unmarried Washington fathered a son by a neighbor’s wife. That story hung around for more than a century until the 1880s, when it was totally discredited.

Washington was the first of many victims. The slanders of the nasty presidential campaign between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1800 placed an indelible stain on our national character that was duplicated many times in other campaigns throughout the 19th century.

By the latter half of the 20th century, the invention of new communications tools — radio, television, and high-speed presses — allowed government officials, as well as business and religious leaders, to infect the public trust on a much broader spectrum, and more quickly, than ever before.

Today, we have the internet and an ever-growing number of social media outlets that can be accessed by virtually anyone to inform and mislead the public.

It is no surprise that we now have a commander-in-chief who is a master of manipulation and misrepresentation.

What is surprising to me is the extent to which Donald Trump has been able to lie and mislead with few consequences.

At least, that’s how it has been so far.

FactCheck.org, the nonprofit created in 2003 to assess the validity of political statements, reported last month that “President Trump has made 1,318 false or misleading claims over 263 days.”

That works out to an average of about five mistakes a day. 

And while FactCheck notes that many of Trump’s statements involve superlatives — the greatest this and the most beautiful that — too many others are substantive; for example his taking credit for events and actions that he was not involved in, such as saving money on specific defense contracts.

More troubling are his claims about legislation that he clearly does not understand, including efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and the impact of tax reform.
 
After a while, you’d think he’d learn to keep his mouth shut. Instead, he continues his one-man effort to widen the “credibility gap” into a canyon.