Every politician I can think of has, at some point, said something that isn’t true. But almost all of them seem to mostly adhere to at least defensible interpretations of the facts. They do so to avoid obtaining a reputation for dishonesty, in part because they fear that obtaining a reputation for dishonesty would hurt their future efforts at communication.
Trump, thus far, has avoided this penalty. He says untrue things. The falseness of his statements is revealed and reported on. And then his future pronouncements are nonetheless treated as deserving the same presumption of truth that we grant to normal people.
That’s a big mistake. Presidents naturally end up making representations about things where the facts are not fully knowable to the public. When Trump does that, we need, as a country, to remember that our president is a huge liar.
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Generally speaking, for a statement to be a lie, it needs to be false and it needs to be something that the speaker knows to be false. That distinguishes it from a wide range of other kinds of false statements that people make:...
This last one is a “demonstrable falsehood,” though to know whether or not it’s a lie, you would have to know, subjectively, what the person saying it knows. Since this is impossible in most cases, it serves as an argument for journalists to avoid the ascription of knowledge and intent inherent in the word “lie.”
But while this is true on a case-by-case basis, we really can know that Trump lies deliberately because he says so himself.
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Trump, in short, lied for personal gain and not only isn’t ashamed of it but actually bragged about it repeatedly in books. During depositions taken as part of a 2007 libel lawsuit against Trump biographer Tim O’Brien, Trump admitted to lying publicly more than 30 times in order to avoid lying under oath and perjuring himself.
In other words, while it’s hard to know the mental state behind any particular untrue thing Trump says, it’s easy to know that Trump is a person who knows the difference between telling the truth and lying. He knows how to tell the truth when it suits him but frequently prefers to lie.
None of this was true. Critically, none of it was demonstrably false at the time Trump said it. But equally critically, a reasonable person would have known better than to believe in any of it because Trump lies all the time.
Yet the troubling thing about media coverage of Trump isn’t that the press has failed to label lies as lies once they are proven to be lies. It’s that these kinds of statements continue to be taken at face value when they are made, as if they were offered by a normal, reasonably honest person. But Trump is not a reasonably honest person. He is someone who flings around unconfirmed accusations and demonstrable falsehoods with abandon — and who does so, by his own admission, for calculated strategic purposes.
Nobody can stop him from acting this way if he wants to, but we don’t need to act naive about it. When a hardcore serial liar says something new, treat his claim with the extreme skepticism it deserves.
