Trump whoppers.....

Let the Big Lies Begin

If Trump is only benefiting from his whoppers, maybe it’s time for the whole field to get in on the act.

By Jack Shafer

Everybody knows that politicians lie and exaggerate. All you have to do is turn on your television. But Campaign 2016 might be teaching a corollary lesson to the trailing candidates for president. Perhaps they aren’t lying enough for their own political good.

Donald Trump is the leading indicator that voters favor a good liar: Despite having earned more “four-Pinocchio” awards from Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler than any other candidate, Trump leads the new Washington Post/ABC News poll of likely Republican voters, with 32 percent. The most recent Trump whopper to receive a four-Pinocchio rating is his recent and repeated assertion that he saw New Jersey Muslims celebrating the fall of the twin towers on 9/11. (The fact-checking shops at both the New York Times and the Tampa Bay Times concur with the Post.)

Placing second in the Post/ABC poll at 22 percent is Ben Carson, who could start a used toy shop with his Pinocchio collection. Hillary Clinton is another close friend of Pinocchio whose unique relationship with the truth hasn’t hurt her political standing: She leads the Democratic polls by double digits. At the rate that Kessler is handing out Pinocchios, the Post will run out of them by early spring.

We generally dislike liars, so why do we tolerate well-documented political lies? For one thing, findings by the fact-checkers aren’t evenly distributed within the culture. Nobody but political fanatics pay much mind to them. To injure a politician, documentation of his lie must puddle out to television and the Web, where the sizable audiences reside. But even then, the politician has the advantage. He can level a countercharge, saying that he’s telling the truth and the press—the scheming, oily, wicked, privacy-invading press—has it in for him and is doing all the lying.

As trust in the press (and other institutions) has fallen in recent decades, the counterattack gambit has worked for many politicians. This has been Trump’s path. He complicates the fact-checkers’ job by lying with effortlessness and rapidity, making it become difficult to keep up with his bullplucky. After getting caught in a lie, Trump tends to retweet or repeat it, writes Tufts University’s Daniel W. Drezner today. Next, he bullies the media for reporting on his statement. (Today, for example, Trump demanded an apology from the Post for pinning Pinocchios to his 9/11 tale.) If Trump ever deigns to backtrack on a brazen lie, it’s to claim that he’s been misinterpreted.

Not all lies are created equal. When Hillary Clinton lies, she generally does so with legalistic care. You get the sense that she knows what the exact truth is. But you also get the sense that she knows she’ll suffer if she provides the whole truth, so she shades the facts with interpretations and embellishments that flatter or favor her. She presents an incomplete timeline for her email account. She claims that her email practices were “permitted.” She overstates her cases and fibs with the numbers. Clinton has been doing it so long and so well that by 1996, New York Times columnist William Safire had already diagnosed her as a “congenital liar.”

Trump's and Carson's lies, on the other hand, come from the land of bullshit, that wonderful place where loose facts and wishful thinking mate to produce a quotable soundbite. They’re not trying to deceive you in a Clintonian fashion. They’re indifferent to the truth, content to say the first things that pop into their brains. You can see this strategy at work in Trump’s story about the American Muslims celebrating the fall of the twin towers, or his bogus assertion that the federal government is steering refugees to states that have Republican governors, or his claim that “61 percent of our bridges are in trouble.” He’s just winging it. If something gets broken in the telling of one of his stories, he doesn’t think it’s his fault.

Ben Carson brings the quality of moonshine to his lies. Whenever he goes on, he voices the sort of stuff you hear mumbled from the sozzled end of a dive bar. Take, for example, his claim that Mahmoud Abbas, Ali Khamenei and Vladimir Putin were classmates at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, or his idea that “a lot of people who go into prison straight” come out gay. Carson is much better at spotting other candidate’s lies than he is his own. Originally, he backed Trump’s claim about celebrating American Muslims. Yesterday, he said that the film he saw was shot in the Middle East, not New Jersey.

In the long run, being called a liar should damage Carson more than Trump, because unlike Trump, he’s running a campaign based on his rectitude. But how badly will the barbs hurt him? Telling the truth has traditionally been only a small part of a politician’s job, after all. Campaign promises, which truth-in-packaging laws should outlaw as acts of fraud, do as much damage to virtue as campaign lies, yet we tolerate them. Hell, we encourage them!

It’s a vile position to defend, but here we are. Honesty is not the best policy in modern presidential politics. Psychological researchers would have us believe that contradictory evidence isn’t as effective as it should be in changing our political views. Instead of changing our minds, we tend to dig deeper into whatever silo we occupy. In this light, Trump’s reality bending isn’t sociopathic, it’s just a grandiose version of what normal people do. Remember how the pundits kept telling us that now Trump had gone too far, and his supporters would reject him and he’d drop in the polls? Instead, with every campaign Pinocchio, Trump’s supporters have become even more tightly bound to him.

What’s keeping the rest of the GOP from accepting the new rules? Carly, stop being defensive about your Planned Parenthood lies and start claiming that you saw those fetuses being sold in person. Jeb, you’re already taking credit for the Florida housing bubble—why not plant your family flag on the Internet, too? And Rubio, you can start talking about how Kasich comes from a family of known criminals … or whatever feels good to you that morning. The same goes for Sanders, O’Malley, and Cruz: Unshackle yourself from the bounds of truth!

And may the worst liar win.