President Donald Trump is under attack for a private speech on Wednesday where he admitted to making up details about the U.S.-Canada trade balance in a conversation with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. According to Trump, Trudeau told him that Canada does not have a trade deficit with the U.S.—which is true—but Trump insisted otherwise. “I said, ‘Wrong, Justin, you do.’ I didn’t even know,” Trump said during the fundraiser in Missouri. “I had no idea. I just said, ‘You’re wrong.’”

“Bragging about lying to an ally,” lamented Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin. “How stupid. How Trump.” Jesse Ferguson, a former spokesman for Hillary Clinton, tweeted, “President of The United States brags to his donors that he lies to foreign leaders of allied nations.” “When people try to tell you that Trump doesn’t lie,” wrote Mother Jones’ Mark Follman, “remind them that Trump told a bunch of his donors straight-up that he does, even to the leader of one of our closest allies.”

But these characterizations of Trump as a liar aren’t quite accurate, or at least don’t provider the full picture. Trump’s comments illustrate instead that he’s a full-fledged bullshit artist. There’s a difference: Lying involves conscious deception, whereas bullshitting is a more insidious attempt to blur the lines between truth and falsehood.

No, let's be clear. He wasn't bragging about lying. He was bragging about bullshitting. https://t.co/j6JQLNFvdL https://t.co/lna8vIOSeo — Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) March 15, 2018

“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth,” the philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote in his 2005 book On Bullshit. “Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all bets are off.... He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.”

I cannot say often enough, the key text for this presidency is Harry Frankfurt’s ON BULLSHIT. It is the secret decoder ring, the shekinah, what-have-you. Read it, please. https://t.co/tlfRFw9fXl — Eric Rauchway (@rauchway) March 15, 2018

In 2015, I drew on Frankfurt’s work to argue that Trump, then in the early stages of his presidential campaign, had all the characteristics of a bullshit artist: He not only frequently made false statements, but was indifferent to whether they were false or not. In doing so, he undermines the very idea that the truth is relevant or even knowable.