All this is junior varsity mendacity. In contrast, Trump is the champ of prevarication.

You don’t need to go back eight years to find a Trump embellishment; eight minutes is more than sufficient. In March, Politico chronicled a week of Trump remarks and found on average one misstatement every five minutes. The Huffington Post once chronicled 71 inaccuracies in an hourlong town hall session — more than one a minute.

If Clinton declares that she didn’t chop down a cherry tree, that might mean that she actually used a chain saw to cut it down. Or that she ordered an aide to chop it down. As for Trump, he will insist, “I absolutely did not chop down that cherry tree,” even as he clutches the ax with which he chopped it down moments earlier on Facebook Live.

Trump used to boast that he and Vladimir Putin were buddies — “I spoke directly and indirectly with President Putin” — only to acknowledge later that they had never met or spoken. He retweeted an incendiary graphic indicating that 81 percent of murdered whites are killed by blacks (the actual figure is 15 percent). He denied telling The New York Times’s editorial board that he would impose a 45 percent tariff on China; The Times then released the audio of him saying just that.

Then there was Trump’s claim that he had seen thousands of Muslims celebrating in New Jersey after 9/11. That was preposterous, but he then claimed that an article from the time backed him up (it didn’t), mocked the disabled reporter who wrote it, and denied he had done so. Lately he stitched yet another quilt of lies about all this.