It’s hard to accurately characterize President Donald Trump’s habit of making consistently false, frequently self-contradictory, often hypocritical, and always flamboyant statements. No word quite captures their all-encompassing magnitude, their frequency, and, often, their sheer pointlessness. “Lies” is always a good place to start, but in Trump’s case it only begins to cover the problem. “Bullshitting” is too cute for the rolling crisis we find ourselves in. “Gaslighting” implies that something strategic is happening, and Trump appears to be working on pure intuition. We don’t have the language to convey how serious the president’s lies—or obfuscations or exaggerations or feints or whatever else you want to call them—are.

Furthermore, we don’t know with any certainty what effect his public statements are having on policy. What does it mean when the president, say, offers a grieving Gold Star family $25,000 but doesn’t pay up? Does it imply that he thinks the military’s survivor benefits program is inadequate, or did he just want to weasel out of an awkward situation? Are his threats to start a nuclear war with North Korea serious, or a bluff? Does he really want to blow up Obamacare, or was that a poor attempt to move complicated legislative processes forward?



Axios’s Mike Allen has taken a stab at diagnosing the problem. Earlier this week, Allen argued that Trump’s inability to tell the truth represented a kind of ontological problem that the media was ill-equipped to handle. In a follow-up post, Allen took this argument in a more interesting direction, arguing that Trump’s brazenly untrue statements represent an “alternate reality” that is separate from the “reality” of policy-making cabinet officials like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis.



“It’s a feature, not a bug, of this White House for Trump to say one thing about policy, and for his cabinet or hand-picked officials to say or do the exact opposite,” Allen writes. “This dynamic—like the spreading of fake news or false statements—makes it hard for the media, Republicans, and his cabinet to determine when to take the leader of the free world seriously. ... This is not a plot of evil genius to keep friends and foes guessing. It’s the inevitable output of an improvisational president who often says whatever pops into his head.”



This is fairly banal stuff. Because everyone knows the president is full of it, it’s hard to hold him accountable and even harder to push policies through, since no one knows where the president stands on any one issue at any one time. (There is an element of Schroedinger’s cat to Trump’s presidency; he simultaneously stands for a very specific agenda and nothing at all.) This is basically the position of the rest of the administration, with Tillerson famously saying that the president “speaks for himself.”

