Lying Liars

 Richardson's run down today focuses on the rampant lying of the Trump Administration. One of Trump's political insights going back to 2016 is that people have such low opinions of politicians that they will assume the worst about them, so he can behave terribly and more importantly openly terribly and lots of people will just shrug it off.

"All politicians are liars" is a popular trope, that up until Trump was largely untrue. Politicians have always promised things that they would struggle to deliver once in office, though if a politician ran on a specific platform, often they would try to pass that platform. Given the nature of our political system, if you ran on ending legal abortions or universal healthcare, you would not be able to achieve that if you won. That's not exactly lying, but you can see why people return to "All politicians are liars."

Even more so, this is true if "All politicians are corrupt." This builds on the above idea, if Senator Smith runs on slashing the defense budget to pay for better schools, and then is unable to achieve this, the lazy assumption is that Smith was paid off by defense contractors. 

What Trump has done is to take these ideas - which are far more prevalent the further you move down the education pyramid - and supercharge them. In 2016, he famously said, "I alone can fix it." Much of his evangelical support began with the idea that this deeply flawed man was their champion precisely because he was deeply flawed. His own corruption would allow him to fight the corruption in DC.

Obviously, that was some weapons grade bullshit.

It is reasonable to wonder how much longer his naked greed and mendacity will be tolerated by even his supporters. People would rather chew their own foot off than admit they were wrong about something like that, so there's a real good chance that he continues to hold onto a fair amount of the electorate. Still, what is that fair amount? 35%? 27%? Can he go lower than the Crazification Factor?

This doesn't mean that his voters will vote for Democrats. However, if millions of them stay home....