You want to know how inured we are to Trump’s lies? A headline in the Washington Post this week passed almost without notice. “President Trump has made 1628 false or misleading claims in 298 days.” I’ll bet it went right by you, along with this: “In the past 35 days, Trump has averaged an astonishing nine claims a day.” That would be false claims, in case you were wondering. According to the Post’s calculations, Trump has averaged 5.5 lies a day, putting him “on track to reach 1,999 claims by the end of his first year in office, though he obviously would easily exceed 2,000 if he maintained the pace of the past month.”

The Post is pussyfooting around by calling Trump’s lies “false and misleading claims.” To use only one of the Post’s examples, Trump has said the Affordable Care Act was dying or dead at least 60 times since taking office, despite the fact that the Congressional Budget Office has repeatedly found that the health care exchanges are “expected to remain stable for the foreseeable future,” according to the Post. The Hill reported last week that more than 200,000 people signed up for Obamacare on the first day of open enrollment, with over a million visiting the Healthcare.gov sign-up site. By any reasonable measure, calling a functioning federal program “dead” when in fact it is alive and well is not “misleading,” it’s a lie. With Trump’s repetitions, it is 60 lies.

But it’s not how many times Trump has lied that makes him remarkable. It is how he lied, and why. It would appear that Trump lies instinctively, automatically, reflexively, almost as a matter of course. But he doesn’t lie that way at all. Trump tells lies as a way to exercise power. He used lies to accumulate wealth as a businessman. He used lies to accumulate votes as a candidate. He used lies to accumulate power as a president. Now he’s using lies to keep himself from being removed from office.

It’s amazing how similar Trump’s lies are to the perpetual campaign of propaganda used by Russian President Vladimir Putin to maintain power. After taking power in 2000, the first thing Putin did was seize or co-opt most of Russian news media by jailing or exiling its oligarch owners. Once he controlled the media, he set about firing executives of state-owned outlets like the RIA Novosti news agency, liquidating their assets and remaking them in his image. This resulted in classic Soviet-style-all-lies-all-the-time Russian propaganda cranked out around the clock on TV and newspapers across Russia. The only difference between what Putin does and the way Trump behaves here is ownership of the media. The perpetual production and dissemination of lies are exactly the same. Lies are the way authoritarians exercise power. If you are governed by a set of rules and laws, and then tell lies that enable you to break those rules and laws, the lies give you power. It’s like you’re standing astride the life of the nation and saying, I know I’m lying. You know I’m lying. I’m powerful and you’re not. Fuck you.

There’s only one thing Trump and Putin care about: power. They showed their affinity for each other last week in Vietnam when Trump repeatedly and affirmatively quoted Putin denying that Russia had anything to do with “meddling” in U.S. elections last year, despite irrefutable evidence to the contrary that has built up since American intelligence agencies concluded over a year ago that Russia had hacked Democratic party servers and sought to disrupt our elections.