President-elect Donald Trump, as is his wont, has been making contradictory statements all month about the fate of Obamacare, variously stating that he favors and opposes House Speaker Paul Ryan’s plan of “repeal and replace.” In an interview on Saturday with The Washington Post, Trump surprised many in his party by promising “insurance for everybody” and saying he was developing his own replacement plan. As Yuval Levin reported in National Review, “the conservative health-care universe, including some people on Trump’s own team, quickly concluded that the separate administration plan he described was entirely a figment of Trump’s imagination.”

Levin’s report makes clear a blunt fact about America’s new president: He is a fantasist, a habitual liar who is willing to say anything to win a short-term political advantage. As Senator Bernie Sanders asked in an interview with MSNBC last month, “What do you do when you have a president-elect, soon to be president, who—and I say this not happily, but I think most people who observe him would agree—is a pathological liar who changes his mind every single day?”

America has had other presidents who were slippery with the truth, notably Richard Nixon, but their lies were never as pervasive as Trumps. America has also had a fantasist president before: Ronald Reagan repeatedly falsely claimed that he participated in the liberation of Nazi death camps (in fact Reagan spent World War II in Hollywood, making movies) and apparently told a fictional war story as if it were real. But Reagan’s lies fall in the category of a gifted storyteller who spun yarns to establish an emotional connection to his audience. Trump’s lies, as in the health-care gambit, are both more frequent and more cynical, often just used to dominate a momentary political victory and be quickly forgotten.

America is about to begin a hair-raising experiment, as there has never been a U.S. president like Trump. In his complete lack of political experience or loyalty to his party, in his shameless and unrelenting dishonesty, in his evident ignorance of the most rudimentary knowledge about policy and the workings of the political system he will preside over, Donald Trump is beyond compare.

In trying to come to grips with Trump, writers have resorted to all sorts of analogies. One popular mode compares him to all sorts of autocrats, ranging from Adolph Hitler to Benito Mussolini to Viktor Orbán to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Such analogies are at worst flawed and, at best, premature. While Trump has shown all sorts of authoritarian inclinations, this hasn’t yet manifested in either creating authoritarian mass movements (as the classic fascist dictators did) or thwarting the legal system. Trump might go in such directions, but for now, such analogies are imperfect.

