During his hourlong tire fire of an interview with the shockingly composed David Muir on Wednesday night, the sheer volume of breathtaking lies flippantly uttered by President Trump made it legitimately difficult to decide which one of them posed the most direct threat to American democracy. Although some of his outrageous falsehoods came in his trademarked brazen form, others were a bit more subtle, exemplifying one of the more low-key (but no less despicable) ways that President Trump regularly lies to the American people: equivocation.

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When speaking extemporaneously, one of the president's more interesting verbal tics is that when he is asked to make a fact-based assertion of some kind, he offers more than one mutually exclusive response, often in the same breath. This usually occurs when he tries to add qualifiers, and although the differences seem subtle, they have profound implications for the conclusions that can be drawn from them. Here are just some examples from last night's ABC interview:

If people are registered wrongly, if illegals are registered to vote, which they are — if dead people are registered to vote and voting, which they do . There are some . I don't know how many .

Our country has enough problems without allowing people to come in who, in many cases or in some cases, are looking to do tremendous destruction.

You're looking at people that come in, in many cases, in some cases with evil intentions. I don't want that. They're ISIS.

I had a tremendous victory, one of the great victories ever. In terms of counties I think the most ever or just about the most ever .

There are millions of [illegal] votes, in my opinion. ... I didn't say there are millions. But I think there could very well be millions of people.

This interview was obviously chock full of examples, but this habit is hardly new. Here he is in a 60 Minutes interview from November:

STAHL: Are you going to sometimes have that same rhetoric that you had on the stump? Or are you going to rein it in?