in a powerful column in today’s Washington Post titled Of course Trump called Comey a liar: That’s always been his strategy. Consider how he begins:

So Donald Trump is calling James Comey a liar. This puts the fired FBI director in some impressive company. Among those Trump has accused of lying, via pronouncements, tweets and retweets:

Then comes a list of more than forty entries, of names and of categories, each on a single line, with space in between lines, beginning with Ted Cruz and several others of his primary opponents and concluding as follows:

Women who accused him of sexual misconduct China Doctors Baseball’s Alex Rodriguez Star Jones An Ebola patient Edward Snowden

Did I say concluding? Sorry. There is one more entry in that list:

Anyone who didn’t tune in to GOP debates to watch Trump

The list alone should serve as a reminder to all those who refuse to apply the terms liar and lying to Trump of their failure to properly describe Trump.

Then Milbank writes the following:

Accusing others of lying is a bit rich coming from the man who has done more than any other to turn public discourse into a parallel universe of alternative facts. If we were psychoanalyzing Trump, we might say he is projecting. Of course, if we were psychoanalyzing Trump, we might throw the entire DSM at him, starting with antisocial personality disorder and working our way through narcissistic personality disorder and then paranoid personality disorder.

“a parallel universe of alternative facts” — except in the only universe we know there is no such thing. Trump’s statements are untrue, and it does not matter whether or not when he utters them he believes them or not. All that matters is that by the utterance he changes or if it you will poisons the political discourse in a way that undercuts our liberal democracy and provides him with excuse not to deal with reality.