Even worse, not only were they lying, but there were more liars than ever before, and on more platforms. They had Fox News. They had right-wing think tanks feeding pundits to other cable networks and publishing op-eds in newspapers. They had the conservative Internet. They had this thing called Ann Coulter. They lied and lied and lied.

And the biggest lie of all was that the mainstream media had a liberal bias, because from where I sat, the mainstream media seemed like part of the problem. They never seem to call out the lying liars on their lies. Far from it—they would invite the lying liars to come back on the air and lie some more next time. Not only were these people lying with total impunity, but they were getting rewarded for lying if they could do it entertainingly.

So I wrote a book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, about how this was poisoning our discourse. I wrote about how Fox News and the right-wing echo chamber worked, but I also explored how these lies were seeping out of the conservative bubble and into the so-called “liberal media” without being challenged. Asking whether the mainstream media had a liberal bias, I argued, was asking the wrong question. Their bias was toward getting ratings. And that meant reveling in conflict and sensationalism. And if that meant putting lying liars on the air, then so be it.

Two years after that, I wrote The Truth (with Jokes), focused on how the Bush administration had lied us into a war, and into two gigantic tax cuts, and into giving Bush four more years to keep lying about economic and foreign policy as our president. All of this to say that I care a lot about people in politics telling the truth. And even considering all the horrible things Trump got away with during the campaign—mocking a disabled reporter, attacking a Gold Star family, referring to Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and “drug dealers,” calling for Muslims to be banned from our country—I still can’t believe he got away with lying so much.

Frankly, it all made me wonder whether, sadly, the war was over and the lying liars had won. Back in the good old days, fact-checking politicians was a different ball game. Looking back now, it seems almost adorable that I made a decent living writing books about catching right-wing Republicans in their lies. What I did was effective, I realize now, mainly because a lot of their lies had the veneer of plausibility, and because at least some of the liars liked to pretend that they were telling the truth—which was of course a lie, but which was also part of the fun. But now we seem to have entered an era where getting caught lying openly and shamelessly, lying in a manner that insults the intelligence of both your friends and foes, lying about lying, and lying for the sake of lying have all lost their power to damage a politician.

In fact, the “Trump Effect” yields the opposite result: Trump supporters seem to approve of the fact that he lies constantly, including to them. Like a movie that is loosely based on a true story, Trump’s fans seem to feel that he is making the dull reality of politics more fun and interesting by augmenting it with gross exaggeration, and often utter fantasy.

During the campaign, Trump would give speeches that would just be one lie after another, with a personal insult or two thrown in to keep things interesting. And the media would just air these speeches in their entirety. Here’s a thought experiment. What would Trump have had to say for a network to cut off his speech and break in, with the anchor saying, “Good Lord. I’m sorry. We’re just not going to show you any more of this crap.” Or at least run a ticker at the bottom of the screen with some underpaid intern just Googling the number Trump was pulling out of his ass.