The scariest thing about Donald Trump’s relationship with the truth

That Donald Trump doesn’t tell the truth isn’t news. It’s a feature, not a glitch, of his presidency and his life.

What is newsworthy, however, is that the rate of Trump’s dishonesty is picking up — rapidly — the longer he spends in office.

Consider this from The Washington Post Fact Checker’s ongoing tally of Trump’s falsehoods:

“In 2017, Trump made 1,999 false or misleading claims. In 2018, he added 5,689 more, for a total of 7,688. And in 2019, he made 8,155 suspect claims.

“In other words, in a single year, the president said more than the total number of false or misleading claims he had made in the previous two years. Put another way: He averaged six such claims a day in 2017, nearly 16 a day in 2018 and more than 22 a day in 2019.”

Let me just re-emphasize something there: “In other words, in a single year, the president said more than the total number of false or misleading claims he had made in the previous two years.”

And it’s not like Trump didn’t say any false or misleading things in his first two years in office! His record of prevarication — in just those first two years — is well beyond anything we have seen from a president (or any politician) in modern memory.

According to CNN’s Daniel Dale, Trump made 81 false claims in the last week alone. That’s above his average of 61 per week since Dale began tabulating Trump’s falsehoods on July 8, 2019. In that time, Trump has made 1,636 false claims since July 8, an average of about nine per day.

What Trump is doing, whether consciously or unconsciously, is continuing to stretch the idea of “truth” and “fact” in ways those two ideas have never been stretched before. And his very willingness to push and push and push beyond even the outer limits of what most people would consider being honest has — and will have — a profound effect on who we are as Americans.

The best way I can explain this is to take it out of a political context and put it in an athletic one.

Think of a basketball game in which one team, from the start, played such aggressive defense that — by the rules — they should be called for a foul on every play. In short: If the referees enforced the rules as written, every single player on the team would foul out of the game within minutes. But what is more likely to happen in such a scenario is that the refs hold their whistles somewhat, not wanting to make the game unwatchable or unplayable. The result? The team playing overly aggressive defense effectively changes the definition of a “foul” — allowing themselves significantly more leeway in how they can guard the other team and likely giving them a competitive edge.

That’s what Trump is doing. His assault on the very idea that truth and facts aren’t partisan positions has effectively changed the rules by which he is judged by the public. One example: Trump’s oft-repeated “fake news” mantra, which is beloved by his base, doesn’t mean what it purports to mean. “Fake” news is news that Trump either doesn’t like or is unfavorable to him. That he has co-opted the term “fake” for that sort of news, and that so many of his supporters believe it, tells you all you need to know about what Trump’s lying has wrought.

But again, it’s not just that Trump doesn’t tell the truth. It’s that — to borrow the above basketball metaphor — he keeps guarding the other team more and more aggressively, daring the refs to call him for a foul. Trump is not satisfied with just blurring the lines of what is fact and what is fiction; he wants to destroy the concept of “facts” entirely.

And unfortunately, this pushing of limits has impacts that go well beyond Trump’s time in office — whether that is another year or another five years. Politics is a copycat business, and while it’s hard to imagine any future politician flaunting truth as publicly as Trump, you can be sure that every single elected official has taken note of the fact that Trump’s mountain of lies and mistruths don’t seem to have disqualified him in the eyes of lots of voters.

That will be one of Trump’s lasting legacies in this country — and it’s a very, very troubling one.