Why Trump Can Lie and No One Seems to Care

[gratuitous]

13. Depends on what is meant by "nobody" or "no one"

I know that I certainly care about the sheer volume of lying pumped out by candidate Trump, and I'm appalled that it doesn't get more play in the popular media.

But as for "all of them lie," I would submit that some lies are qualitatively worse than others. The candidate who swears up and down that he'll shake up Washington if you elect him to Congress has to know that he doesn't have a chance in hell of doing any such thing. The people who vote for him probably know that, too. When a candidate says he's going to stop all illegal immigration or build a wall along the southern border and force Mexico to pay for it, he's lying his ass off. A lot (but significantly not all) of the people who vote for such a demagogue may know he's lying, but they'd like his lie to be true and vote accordingly.

But what about the lies that shoot right past the gate undetected? Lies like how a politically neophyte candidate is going to work with a hostile Congress to enact a program detrimental to most citizens, but selling it as something desirable? The lies pile up so thick it's practically impossible to separate them all out.