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The word “lie” may not adequately describe what is going on here. All presidents lie, at one point or another, some for reasons of state, some for less exalted causes. But what separates Trump is not the sheer volume of falsehoods that pour forth from his mouth. It is that it does not seem to matter to him whether his audience believes them. A lie, after all, is a statement that the speaker not only knows to be false, but intends should be believed; as such, the falsehood must be of a kind that is not easily discovered. In the same way that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, deceit honours truth by its efforts to conceal it. It has the decency, at least, to sneak in by the back door, not parade through the front.

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But Trump’s lies are not of that kind. As the relatively trivial example of the inauguration crowds makes clear, they are evidently, noisily, gaudily untrue. Yet it is clear they are not intended to be disbelieved, either, like the tall tales of a storyteller. Of course, it’s always possible that Trump himself is simply unable to distinguish between fact and fiction, or can’t be bothered to try. But the darker possibility is that the conflation is deliberate, not with the intention of deceiving, of substituting false for true, but of disrupting our ability to tell the two apart, or indeed, by advertising how vast is his own unconcern for the distinction, to lead us in time to be as indifferent, if only out of fatigue. It is to knock truth out of the ring altogether, to demolish it as a criterion by which he is to be judged.