My regular readers will recall I often refer to my regular reader, Jeff. As it happens, Jeff is a real person and one of my very closest friends. He’s an interesting guy, having in life held a wide variety of jobs, from working on a suicide hotline to installing early cell phones, the ones that had to be bolted into a car with that funny curlicue antenna. He has a popular podcast all about traveling around in a van and often spends his weekends on property he bought in southern Illinois watching boats go by on the Illinois River.

Several years ago, as part of a series of videos for YouTube, Jeff did an unusual thing. He traveled, in his van, to every city in the United States named “Aurora.” Those travels brought him to all of the 21-or-so towns with that name, and they ranged from the deserted ghost town of Aurora, Nevada, to the small town of Aurora, Nebraska, where at night the very top of the courthouse sports a flashing strobe light, to honor a fellow named Harold E. Edgerton, a native of the town, who invented the strobe light — a fitting tribute.

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And, of course, Jeff visited the nation’s largest Aurora, the one here in Colorado, as part of his series. And I thought of Jeff and his Aurora visits when I read a recent story in Colorado Politics about a certain former president’s visit to our state, scheduled for today, Oct. 11, in the aforementioned Aurora.

As I’ve oft mentioned, I had the deep and profound honor and privilege of serving my country in uniform for more than 25 years. I started those years as a “finger-on-the-button” nuclear launch officer up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and I finished teaching the Constitution and other subjects to cadets at the Air Force Academy, as well as patrolling the AFA as a military cop.

In each of those military roles, honesty wasn’t just a good idea, it was absolutely vital to accomplishing the mission. I’m sure I don’t have to explain why absolute honesty is critical to working with nuclear weapons, but it is no less vital when teaching the nation’s future military leaders.

Thus, I remain aghast and frankly mystified at the support Donald Trump gets, from people who are apparently — unlike me — able to just overlook fundamental dishonesty. And the good people of Aurora are now in Trump’s line of sight as he continues to spew falsehoods about how our Aurora has been turned into, as he put it, a “war zone” with violent gangs supposedly pouring over the border and now running around Aurora with guns blazing, with the local police cowed into obscurity.

Well, that doomsday rhetoric comes as a surprise to the folks who actually live and work in Aurora. A problem with some gang members in a couple of apartment complexes is being dealt with by the excellent police force there, and most of those gang members are already in jail, even as Trump lies about their continued domination of the city.

Trump doesn’t mention border crossings are way down (USA Today used the word “plunged” to describe the number of crossings), and he ordered his U.S. House acolytes to kill a bill, written by a very conservative GOP senator, that would have strengthened the border even more, a bill that passed the Senate with strong bipartisan support. He’d rather have something to argue about than an actual solution.

Aurora Mayor, and former GOP U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, hardly a liberal, has denounced Trump’s false claims about his town, and even offered to show Trump around the city, to highlight how, though problems exist, the city overall is a delightful place to live and work. Coffman called Trump’s narrative “false,” which is another word for “lie,” as is Trump’s style.

If you think back to the before time, back when, say, we saw an election between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, or more recently between Barack Obama and John McCain, you saw elections between two good Americans who agreed on the essential facts and differed on the best policies to mitigate things that were wrong. And that was back at a time when Republicans didn’t like Russia and certainly weren’t sending vital medical equipment, needed in the U.S. in a time of crisis, to a Russian dictator.

Trump has promised a mass deportation of the 25 million people he claims are in the U.S. illegally. Most reasonable estimates put that number around half that, so things could get dicey for some U.S. citizens should Trump win and insist on finding 25 million. And I’m also wondering how many millions of Americans are waiting for those deportations so they can finally get those choice jobs picking fruits and vegetables and doing the other backbreaking work immigrants tend to be shunted into, but I digress.

No doubt later today there will be a crowd, likely smaller than Trump will admit, that will cheer on his racist and false narratives of life in Aurora and the U.S. in general. Trump’s genius is he has managed to become profoundly dishonest without paying any real price for that corruption.

Facts don’t matter in his relentless pursuit of power, and that’s a shame. Hopefully, the voters of Colorado and the U.S., and perhaps even most of our nation’s Auroras, will finally and decisively put an end to the era of dishonesty as normal. We don’t accept dishonesty in nuclear launch officers, and we certainly shouldn’t accept it in a person who seeks to command all U.S. military forces.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.