Trump's lies can lead to increased knowledge...

[i]Constantine Parkinson was one of the workers who told his story to Foster, his voice firm but his face barely able to look at the camera.

He started work on the canal at 15 years old; like many, he may have lied about his age. He was soon a brakeman, probably on a train carrying rocks to a breakwater. On July 16, 1913, a day he would never forget, he lost his right leg, and his left heel was crushed.

Parkinson explains that his grandmother went to the Canal’s chief engineer, George Goethals, to ask for some sort of assistance. As Parkinson tells it, Goethals’s response was simple: “My dear lady, Congress did not pass any law … to get compensation when [the workers] [lose limbs]. However, not to fret. Your grandson will be taken care of as soon as he [is able to work], even in a wheelchair.”[/i]

[i]“The United States, I mean think of this, spent more money than ever spent on a project before and lost 38,000 lives in the building of the Panama Canal.”

There were multiple attempts to build the Panama Canal, the vital passageway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. But while thousands of people died in these efforts, the toll of American deaths does not remotely approach 38,000 lives Trump claimed in his inaugural address.

Matthew Parker, author of “Hell’s Gorge: The Battle to Build the Panama Canal,” told the BBC that about 25,000 people died, many from mosquito-borne viruses, in the failed French attempt to build the canal in the 1880s. Parker said “virtually none” was American. Rather, they were largely French and Jamaican, he said.

During the U.S. period of construction from about 1904 to 1914, about 6,000 people died, Parker said in the BBC interview, “almost all of whom were from Barbados.” About 300 Americans died in this effort, he said.

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