10,000 Lies: Another Trump Milestone

There is so much evidence that Trump wanted to dismiss the special advocate and put an end to the investigation on Russia that it basically serves as a basis for Mueller's conclusions about whether the president was looking for to obstruct justice.

So why put something that no one takes seriously and is easily unfounded?

Perhaps the best question is why I even bother to write it down? After all, earlier this week, Washington Post investigators took note of an ignominious, but not surprising, moment of Trump's tenure: his 10,000th false or misleading statement. When I asked Bill Adair, professor of journalism at Duke University and creator of Politifact, to put all this dishonesty into context, he said that if all the fact-finding organizations in the United States "put All of their staff on Trump With time, they probably could not follow the whole truth check "with this president.

Trump is lying all the time. It's like that. Yet the unique, deeply corrosive and frankly fascinating ways in which Trump is dishonest have reshaped our political discourse.

Politicians lie. In fact, just about all of us lie at one point. We exaggerate. We are hiding the truth. We elect and we mislead. Elected officials are no different. But generally, this dishonesty has a political purpose or purpose.

With Trump, however, one sees only a total indifference to the truth. He is known to call what he does "a true hyperbole," but even that is misleading because it is far from clear that he understands that the things he says are wrong. It is quite possible, even probable, that he has convinced himself that they are true and that he has neither the capacity nor the psychological structure necessary to understand what the truth really is. This, of course, would make it illusory.

So maybe Trump did not lie when he denied telling McGahn to fire Mueller. The Mueller report tells that in 2018, when the press reported on the incident, he lamented to an assistant that McGahn was a "liar bastard". Maybe Trump is convinced of his own lie.

Whether Trump is a liar or a delusional is open to debate. Less questionable, however, is the destructive impact of his behavior on our politics. Social science research suggests that simply repeating a lie – as Trump constantly does – creates a phenomenon called "illusory truth" that can lead people to believe that it is true. Our brain simply can not handle a torrent of dishonesty, so we adjust our own thinking to pitch. Repeat often so that undocumented immigrants commit more crimes, or the inaugural crowds are the greatest of all time, or you did not ask that the special advocate be fired, and soon you created a new reality – a reality that a representative sample of voters will come to believe.

The worst, "Trump's total disregard for accuracy," said Brendan Nyhan, professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, "undermines the idea that a politician should even care about the accuracy of his statements. ".

When I worked as a speechwriter in the late 1990s, I was surprised by the often heard claim that I wrote lies for politicians. Putting aside ethical concerns, being caught in a lie was so embarrassing and potentially an end of career that it was something that politicians and their staff went out of their way to avoid. But in 2012, I noticed how deliberate deception had begun to infiltrate traditional political rhetoric. I evoked Mitt Romney's flagrant and egregious lies during his presidential campaign that year and how his incessant dishonesty, even in the face of regular checks of the facts correcting the record, "cynically eroded the fragile feeling." trust between voters and voters. " The politicians."

Trump, with his more than 10,000 lies, broke that trust. Indeed, it was striking to see Attorney General William Barr testify before Congress this week as his lies and misleading statements about the Mueller report were exposed. Unlike Trump, Barr lied in a more conventional way – eliciting, shading and shaving his hair around objective reality. The GOP's response to his subterfuge was less conventional: he was hailed by the president and the conservative media as a heroic figure.

Lying has become so rampant in our current politics that it's hard to imagine how to put the genie back into the bottle. We have entered a post-truth political environment in which both sides – though mostly Republicans – will adhere to what Kellyanne Conway, a White House advisor and noted as a letter carrier, has called "alternative facts". The allergy to Trump's Truth has already transformed our politics in a way once unimaginable. We went from George Washington saying "I can not tell a lie" to our present moment: a president who can not tell the truth.