The answers to those questions are starting to take shape, and while the news is by no means good, there are glimmers of hope. It turns out that we didn’t all just throw up our hands and give up on any notion of truth. Policing the president’s boundless mendacity is taking up an enormous proportion of our time and attention — but in an odd way, that may protect us.

The latest occasion to consider the effects of President Trump’s unique enthusiasm for deception comes out of an interview he did with the Wall Street Journal, where he commented on his disastrous speech last week to the Boy Scout Jamboree. With characteristic classlessness, Trump took an event at which presidents usually talk about things like citizenship and integrity and instead delivered a rambling, partisan speech that also included a bizarre story about a developer and his party yacht (“I won’t go any more than that because you’re Boy Scouts. … Oh, you’re Boy Scouts, but you know life.”). To the Journal, Trump claimed, “I got a call from the head of the Boy Scouts saying it was the greatest speech that was ever made to them, and they were very thankful.”

Anyone who heard this immediately knew it couldn’t possibly be true, particularly because the head of the Boy Scouts had issued a public apology for the fact that the president had given such an inappropriate speech at their event. It fits a pattern in which Trump claims absurdly that people are calling him up to tell him that a speech he gave was the greatest thing anyone had ever heard; about the speech he gave on a recent trip to Poland, he said, “enemies of mine are saying it was the greatest speech ever made on foreign soil by a president,” which no one was saying.

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After the Boy Scouts told reporters that there was no such phone call of praise to Trump, something amazing happened: Trump’s spokeswoman admitted that he made the whole thing up. Sort of. Asked by a reporter whether Trump had lied about the Boy Scouts and about another apparently fabricated phone call, this one from Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, Sarah Huckabee Sanders replied that while there was no phone call, “multiple members of the Boy Scout leadership, following his speech there that day, congratulated him, praised him. … I wouldn’t say it was a lie.”

Of course she wouldn’t, because admitting that truth would probably get her fired. But this somewhat trivial story illustrates that this has become a central component of the relationship between the press and the White House: Trump tells a bunch of lies, reporters track down the truth then confront his spokesmen to see how they’ll try to spin it away, and report the results.

You can look at it as a kind of game, but something fundamental has changed. We now assume as a matter of course that whatever the president of the United States says is probably false. This is a 180-degree shift from how every president before him, Democrat and Republican, has been approached. All presidents have lied from time to time, but most of what they said was still true. Not so with Trump.

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He upended a whole series of assumptions about political honesty, not just with the frequency of the lies he tells but also with their brazenness. Some politicians are more honest than others, but they all want us to believe that they’re honest — they avoid lying if they can and want to avoid getting caught when they do lie. They feel that it’s important that people believe them. Trump doesn’t.

I imagine that in the president’s mind, his lies amount to what in advertising is called “puffery,” which is actually a legal term referring to claims that are so outlandish that no one could possibly believe them. But some people do believe them, because there’s an entire media apparatus devoted to convincing Trump supporters that anything they hear from a source other than Fox News or their favorite right-wing radio host is “fake news,” while whatever Trump says must be true.

But as maddening as that may be, it’s important to remember that the truth still has a chance. If it didn’t, Trump’s approval wouldn’t be in the 30s, and you wouldn’t see polls showing 62 percent of Americans saying the president is not honest.

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Of course, some lies are more important than others. The largest portion of Trump’s lies are self-aggrandizing, meant to persuade you of little beyond his fantasticness. His crowds are the biggest, he gave the greatest speech, he signed the most bills, his victory was incredible, everyone loves him. No one’s going to impeach the president for lying about the Boy Scouts, so while it reveals something about his character, it isn’t a story we need to dwell on for weeks. But when Trump crafts a false statement about the meeting his son, son-in-law and campaign chairman had with a group of Russian characters, that’s something much more significant, because it appears to show him engaged in a coverup.

Perhaps the most consequential question is whether we’ll be ready for the time when Trump starts lying to us about matters of life and death. Back in 2002 and 2003, the media and the country as a whole were woefully unprepared for the extraordinary propaganda campaign the Bush administration undertook to convince Americans that if we didn’t invade Iraq, Saddam Hussein would kill us all with his fearsome arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. That campaign worked, the country went along (at first), and the result was the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history, with trillions of dollars spent, thousands of American lives lost, and much of the Middle East thrown into chaos.