In another thread one of our esteemed moderators claimed that HRC is as big a liar as Trump, or perhaps even worse. This isn't merely wrong.
It's ludicrous. For this very simple reason:
Trump is by far the most brazen serial liar in modern political history.
As CNN notes, major media outlets are
finally calling him on it. Among other things, Politico fact-checked everything HRC and Trump said over the last week and found that Trump lies, misleads, or exaggerates
about every three minutes:
The conclusion is inescapable: Trump’s mishandling of facts and propensity for exaggeration so greatly exceed Clinton’s as to make the comparison almost ludicrous.
Trump lies so frequently and so brazenly that the fact-checkers simply can't keep up with him --
he fills the zone with so many lies that few draw any significant coverage:
Daniel Dale, a reporter for the Toronto Star, has taken recently to posting a list on Twitter of all the provably false statements he hears from Trump on the campaign trail each day. It might not be technically fair to call all of these statements “lies” — it’s possible that Trump himself believes them to be true. But at a certain point, his callous disregard for facts crosses the line into criminal neglect.
On many days, Dale counts at least 10 falsehoods. On one day, he counted 18.
Dale . . . decided to tally objectively false things Donald Trump said from September 15-17, and September 19-24. The only day when Trump didn't lie: September 23rd, when he didn't say anything in public at all.
Even more alarming, while Trump often repeats some of his lies from one day to the next, most of the lies Dale recorded were just told once. Over the nine days Dale’s recorded so far, Donald Trump has told a total of 64 unique lies.
Those lies range from the small — like who wrote the song “The Snake” that he likes to recite at his rallies — to the substantial — like saying on four separate occasions that his tax plan would cut taxes on the working class, and three times saying that Hillary Clinton would substantially increase “your taxes.”
. . . The Washington Post, doing a
qualitative analysis of a week of Trump lies, concluded “Trump has nevertheless revealed himself to be a candidate who at times seems uniquely undeterred by facts.” The headline on the front page of Sunday’s Los Angeles Times read “Scope of Trump’s lies unmatched”; in the article, author
Michael Finnegan argued that “Never in modern presidential politics has a major candidate made false statements as routinely as Trump has.”
In this context, the analysis of the
New York Times seems fairly conservative: They only tallied 31 Trump lies over the last week.
The Times’ analysis ignored smaller lies and instead focused on the lies that “bolstered a powerful and self-aggrandizing narrative depicting him as a heroic savior for a nation menaced from every direction” — creating what Republican strategist Mike Murphy called “an unreality bubble.”
If you try to dive into the
reasons Trump lies, you’ve already lost. It grants his lies the dignity of a strategy. The truth is that, by all appearances, Trump seems to lie whenever it suits him.
This is why, because Trump lies so nonchalantly and broadly, the practice of tallying Trump’s lies can end up being weirdly counterproductive. The more conservative tallies make Trump seem relatively honest; the more comprehensive ones just seem like numbers on a page.
But this doesn't trouble Trump's supporters even a little bit. Instead,
they imagine that Clinton is even worse:
Even though
fact-checkers deploy their forces on Trump regularly, he never apologizes or retracts. Calling out his lies doesn’t make his supporters any less loyal to him. People consistently find him more “honest and trustworthy” than his opponent. He still has a reasonable chance of becoming the 45th president of the United States.
Hillary Clinton is disliked and distrusted, but she's a normal candidate who's fit to serve by any conventional measure. Trump, on the other hand, is the most obviously unfit candidate any major political party has ever nominated in the entire history of the United States. In particular, he seems an almost pathological liar. Yet somehow Hillary is the dishonest one.
I wonder how ostensibly sentient humans have become so utterly disconnected from objective reality.