Tapper's interview with Maher touched on three truths that I keep coming back to when I'm asked about covering Trump, so I thought it worth spelling them out here.

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1. The Trump administration's falsehoods are simply on another level

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People complain about how hard the media is on Trump; it's in very large part because there is just such a massive quantity of falsehoods and controversy. And the media's first obligation is to the truth.

Tapper noted that peddling evidence-free conspiracy theories is quite a bit different from President Obama's “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it” comment, which was PolitiFact's Lie of the Year in 2013.

“Politicians lie. It wasn't invented on January 20th,” Tapper said, pointing to Obama's comment and the selling of the Iraq War. “I've never really seen this level of falsehood — just quantitatively.”

The Washington Post's Fact Checker has identified 247 false or misleading claims in Trump's first not-quite two months in office. He has gone a grand total of two full days without uttering something false or misleading. On the first of those two days, it was because he said almost nothing publicly.

2. Pointing this out reinforces the White House's media vs. Trump narrative, but that doesn't mean the media should change

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“I refuse to buy into that paradigm,” Tapper said. “Because the truth of the matter is there's no bias when it comes to facts, and there's no bias when it comes to indecency. It is empirically indecent to make fun of the disabled. … That's just indecent. My children know better than that.”

3. Not all Trump supporters are un-bothered by these things

Polls shows many people who wound up voting for Trump thought he said offensive things about women, minorities and Muslims. Polls today show many Trump supporters wish he would change his Twitter ways.

“I think they didn't like Hillary Clinton for a whole bunch of reasons that I'm not going to cite here,” Tapper said, “and they wanted Washington to do something for them. It's not empirically wrong to say that Washington isn't working for the American people and Washington does too many things for powerful special interests and it's broken.”