tl;dr
Seeing Trump’s falsehoods as foibles is folly. Trump’s lies are a feature, not a bug, of his Presidency and, indeed, of his entire public persona. His promotion of a sinister alternate reality divorced from facts is not an aberration that can be corrected. His misstatements are not mere mistakes. As the Post’s book points out, when called on a lie, Trump not only does not back away from it; he has a tendency to repeat it. In more than four hundred instances, the Post’s fact checkers found, he has repeated the same falsehood at least three times. Joe Scarborough is not even the first person whom Trump has falsely accused of murder since he has been President.
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These are not standard-issue political lies being foisted on the public but nuclear-weapons-grade falsehoods that speak directly to the President’s character. They are of a scale and volume that simply defy precedent, even in a country that had Richard Nixon as its leader. Trump, the Fact Checker’s editor Glenn Kessler writes, is quite simply “the most mendacious President in U.S. history.” There are, sadly, eighteen thousand reasons and counting why he is right.
