Don’t believe liars about anything

Yglesias has a good piece about how ridiculous it is to treat Trump as if anything he says ought to be taken as true until proven otherwise:

The bad news is the fact that Donald Trump is a liar remains incredibly important and yet poorly integrated into ongoing coverage of his administration. Every politician I can think of has, at some point, said something that isn’t true. But almost all of them seem to mostly adhere to at least defensible interpretations of the facts. They do so to avoid obtaining a reputation for dishonesty, in part because they fear that obtaining a reputation for dishonesty would hurt their future efforts at communication.

Trump, thus far, has avoided this penalty. He says untrue things. The falseness of his statements is revealed and reported on. And then his future pronouncements are nonetheless treated as deserving the same presumption of truth that we grant to normal people.

That’s a big mistake. Presidents naturally end up making representations about things where the facts are not fully knowable to the public. When Trump does that, we need, as a country, to remember that our president is a huge liar. . .

Trump frequently makes representations about things where it’s simply not possible to immediately know for sure whether he’s telling the truth, typically because they refer to his private plans or activities. As president, for example, Trump has said that he would develop a plan to provide every American with health insurance, that the North Korean government had agreed to denuclearize, that he would promote a “bill of love” to help DREAMers, that he would take on the National Rifle Association to reduce school shootings, and that he would develop a tax plan that rich people would not benefit “at all” from.

None of this was true. Critically, none of it was demonstrably false at the time Trump said it. But equally critically, a reasonable person would have known better than to believe in any of it because Trump lies all the time.

Yet the troubling thing about media coverage of Trump isn’t that the press has failed to label lies as lies once they are proven to be lies. It’s that these kinds of statements continue to be taken at face value when they are made, as if they were offered by a normal, reasonably honest person. But Trump is not a reasonably honest person. He is someone who flings around unconfirmed accusations and demonstrable falsehoods with abandon — and who does so, by his own admission, for calculated strategic purposes.

Nobody can stop him from acting this way if he wants to, but we don’t need to act naive about it. When a hardcore serial liar says something new, treat his claim with the extreme skepticism it deserves.

Trump is a narcissistic sociopath who has gotten as far as he has because society operates — necessarily — on the assumption that most people aren’t narcissistic sociopaths. Someone who is completely unrestrained by social norms in regard to things like telling the truth has a big advantage over people who feel constrained by truth-telling norms, even if their constraint is a product of nothing more than a purely pragmatic calculation that it doesn’t pay to lie all the time, because in the long run you’ll have no credibility.

Yet in a nation made up in significant part of essentially uneducable marks preyed on by sociopathic con men like Trump, the long run may well never arrive, except in the Keynesian sense.

This ties into a broader point, which is that it’s both irrational and irresponsible to give any credence whatsoever to people who have been established to be brazen liars.  For example, Michael Avenatti revealed yesterday that Keith Davidson, erstwhile attorney to women Trump has had affairs with, simply flat-out lied to the Wall Street Journal a week before the election when he denied he was representing Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels.  The WSJ was pursuing the Daniels story at the time, and printing it at that point would have almost certainly cost Trump the election, given that the election turned on a few tens of thousands of votes in three states.  But they didn’t print it because Davidson lied to them in the most unambiguous terms.

Yet a year and a half later the same paper ran a story about a supposed affair between Elliott Broidy and Shera Bechard, on the basis of nothing more than highly ambiguous representations made by another proven liar (Broidy — a bribe is a lie in monetized form, and Broidy has been convicted of bribing at least seven public officials), who was working with yet another liar (Michael Cohen), for the benefit of the biggest liar of all (Trump).  Why in the world would anyone believe anything these people have to say about anything, let alone something like this?  Yet at this moment it’s still part of the public record that Broidy paid Bechard $1.6 million to shut her up about the — almost certainly fictitious — “affair” he had with her.  (I’m working on nailing down the fictitious nature of this story in a definitive way. Stay tuned for further developments).

A final example:  Here’s a passage from Alice Goffman’s book ON THE RUN, which describes her supposed interrogation by undercover police officers:

They take me up the stairs to the second floor, the Detective Unit. I sit in a little room for a while, and then two white cops come in, dark green cargo pants and big black combat boots, and big guns strapped onto their legs. They remove the guns, and put them on the table facing me.

If you knew nothing about the person making that claim, but you knew a lot about police interrogations, your immediate reaction would be: “this story is bullshit.”  Police are trained, usually with great success, to develop a veritable obsession about not letting their weapons get into the hands of suspects.  That’s why police stations have extremely strict protocols about not taking weapons into interrogation rooms. And any cop who behaved in the manner Goffman describes would certainly be fired if something went wrong as a result.

Now it’s true this story isn’t demonstrably false, in the sense that it literally couldn’t have happened.  If the narrator was someone with a sterling track record for veracity, then the appropriate reaction would be to believe that, on this occasion, a couple of cops behaved in an extraordinary fashion.  But if it turns out the narrator is somebody who appears to fabricate lots of stories to “punch up” the narrative, as they say in Hollywood, then it’s safe to say that your initial reaction was in fact correct.