So by Augustine’s lights, if you think the President is a cretin (or at least uninterested in the details of governance), then you don’t also get to call him a liar. Another story in the Times suggested that even senators don’t think the President understands the upper house’s version of a health care bill. Plenty of first- and second-hand accounts of conversations with Trump say or imply that he doesn’t know stuff. That’d put him on the “dope” side of the dope/liar spectrum.

Come on, though. Trump might be someone’s useful idiot, but he can’t be that useful or that much of an idiot. Which means he falls under Augustine’s broader criteria for lies and their badness. To Augustine, the severity of a lie depends on who benefits (and how) and who gets hurt (and how). Saving yourself from pain or death? Probably OK. Hurting someone else to gain money or power? Bad. Without getting inside the President’s head, no one can know the known knowns and known unknowns behind the Times list of lies. So Augustine doesn’t get him off the hook.

Thomas Aquinas had a different heuristic: “A jocose lie is told in order to make fun, an officious lie for some useful purpose, and a mischievous lie in order to injure someone.” Again: It’s the target that matters, not the weapon … except in a fourth, special case, lies told just because the liar delights in deceiving for its own sake. The jocosity exemption might cover some of the lies, but surely not all. We still couldn’t know which lies were “useful” or just aimed at injury.

At least in the quotes I’ve cherry-picked, these old guys haven’t taken into account imbalances in power between the liar and the lie-ee. I don’t think I’m being too post-modern here. Even a small lie from the most powerful person on Earth is more consequential than a massive one from my seven-year-old son. No matter what the intent of the lie, the power of the liar makes a difference in how the lie lands.

Sisela Bok, who famously wrote about lies in the aftermath of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers scandals, said that liars are often able to convince themselves they’re not doing anything wrong. Specifically, they take themselves off the hook when they think their lies avert harm, are harmless themselves, or protect a secret. Combine all that with a liar who thinks he’s working for the public good, and you get “the most dangerous body of deceit of all,” Bok writes. “Rulers, both temporal and spiritual, have seen their deceits in the benign light of such social purposes. They have propagated and maintained myths, played on the gullibility of the ignorant, and sought stability in shared beliefs. They have seen themselves as high-minded and well-bred—whether by birth or by training—and as superior to those they deceive.”

Trump may indeed see himself as high-minded and well-bred. Despite all the stories about his apparent lack of interiority, I’ll at least assume that the President sees himself as the protagonist of his own story—the good guy. But just as a matter of observation, Trump’s lies don’t look like a 12-dimensional-chess framework designed to serve some greater good. He looks like he’s trying to dominate his perceived enemies, to humiliate people, to cast himself in what he thinks is a good light. When Trump says something that contradicts something else he’s said, he doesn’t seem to notice or care. It’s a weird kind of zen, in-the-moment lying. It’s all id. There’s no, ahem, executive function saying, Don’t say that! It doesn’t make sense! It’s not internally consistent!