Lies Used To Matter

 We used to be a proper country, where a politician lying obviously and shamelessly in the People's House would bring down universal opprobrium. I have my issues with the way Matthew Yglesias too often insists on treating Trump like a normal politician who has policy positions and paper. However, he can also rightly point out that much of what Trump said last night was obviously false. Now, he does say "untrue" as opposed to "lies" and I think that matters. I read someone saying that Trump's manifestly odious personal character is now background noise, but I think some of that is that "Trump said things that were not factual" as opposed to "Trump lies all the time."

As Paul Campos notes, a LOT of American voters are, let's say, ignorant of policy and governance. Trump is already unpopular, and I have to think that tanking the stock market and causing prices to rise with a chaotic tariff policy (the Commerce Secretary suggested they might repeal the tariffs, but who really knows anything).

As Paul Krugman reminds us, the DOGE arsonists don't know shit about shit, and the first thing to break could be Social Security payments. The NRCC has already told its members not to have town halls, because while many Americans are deeply ignorant about how government works, some communities - especially farm communities and areas that have a lot of Federal workers - are already feeling the chaos. They are pissed. 

Lies matter, because you cannot make good decisions based on wrong data and facts. Trump's brazen disregard for facts combines with the sycophancy that characterizes everyone around him to create massive wellspring of ignorance. That ignorance will lead to more disastrous policy making, and the chaos that swirls around Trump is really bad for business planning. 

If we stagger around for two years with Trump actively destroying everything good about America, I have to wonder - even if we have free and fair elections in 2026 and 2028, if the current iteration of the Constitution can survive not only the abuse, but the manifestation of all the many shortcomings in that document.

UPDATE: Sweet merciful Jeebus, read through the Times' "fact checking". They label outright lies as "misleading" or "needs context".