Thursday was a litmus test for American political journalism. Previously, President Trump had said he knew nothing of longtime fixer and certified genius brain Michael Cohen's $130,000 hush money payment to a porn star during the 2016 election. On the Tweet Machine Thursday morning, Trump echoed the words of Rudy Giuliani from the night before and said he'd arranged for Cohen to be paid back for it—meaning he knew full well about the payment.

When you know what the truth is, but purposefully say the opposite, that is known as a lie. Yet most Mainstream Outlets struggled to come to grips with this. The nation's Papers of Record and major TV news organizations called it a "contradiction," or merely pointed out the president's previous denials. The New York Times sent out a particularly heinous push alert suggesting Trump "reversed his position" on the issue. This does not just avoid pointing out the president lied, it also buys into his view that there is no such thing as truth in the public discourse—merely competing narratives to be sold to the public. If enough people believe your "position" about what happened in objective reality, it might as well be true. If your "position" disintegrates, you can just adopt another one.

But Thursday night brought some reassurance from an unlikely place: The Fox News Channel. Neil Cavuto broke out a monologue for the president that stopped short of calling his Position Reversals "lies" ("Now, I’m not saying you’re a liar," Cavuto said. "You’re the president. You’re busy."), but suggested Trump is filling his own Swamp with blatant non-facts almost constantly:

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No one on Fox is ever going to call the president out for exactly what he is, but this is just about the best we could possibly hope for. Cavuto put together a fine list of obvious falsehoods continually spouted by this president:

You didn’t know about the $130,000 payment to a porn star, until you did ... the time you said the Russians didn’t interfere in the 2016 election, until a lot of Republicans had to remind you they did. You came back months later and you said, ‘Well, I never said that Russia didn’t meddle in the election,’ when in fact you had—a lot ... You claimed your tax plan was the biggest in U.S. history, when it wasn't. Or that the bill you signed to make it all happen would cost you a fortune, when it turns out it is going to help you make a bigger fortune.

Cavuto ran through all the times various Trump employees have been Doing a Great Job and Aren't Going Anywhere until they are unceremoniously defenestrated. He even pointed out a somewhat overlooked detail of yesterday's Official Presidential Twitter Communications:

You insist that money from the campaign or campaign contributions played no role in this transaction. Of that you’re sure. The thing is, not even 24 hours ago, sir, you couldn’t recall any of this.

This is an incisive observation. Not only does Trump suddenly remember the payoff—he knows all the intricate details of how the money got into Stormy Daniels' pocket, and he knows without a shadow of a doubt. What a miraculous, one-day recovery from a severe bout of amnesia. It's a legitimate question whether a Fox News host just went farther than The New York Times in plainly evaluating the president's behavior.

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The running theme from Cavuto was that Trump's constant peddling of obvious fiction gives "ammunition" to those looking to criticize him, and undermines his credibility when he goes after the press as "Fake News." Inevitably, Trump had a Fake News tweet this morning—albeit one with far more legitimacy than most of his tantrums. NBC News made a serious reporting error Thursday when it claimed there was a wiretap on Michael Cohen, and the president leapt at the opportunity:

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NBC NEWS is wrong again! They cite “sources” which are constantly wrong. Problem is, like so many others, the sources probably don’t exist, they are fabricated, fiction! NBC, my former home with the Apprentice, is now as bad as Fake News CNN. Sad! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 4, 2018

Except there is one key detail here: NBC News corrected its story as soon as it realized its mistake. Because it is a legitimate journalistic enterprise, NBC is concerned with reporting the truth, and is willing to admit mistakes—and offer transparency on how and why they were made—to ensure readers are not misinformed going forward.

This is not a characteristic shared with some of the president's favorite outlets, which is why Sean Hannity and Fox News are currently being sued by the family of Seth Rich. Breitbart and InfoWars and others have not addressed the fact that "Jade Helm 15"—a standard military exercise that far-right outlets (and, reportedly, Russian bots) characterized as an Obama administration plan to round up political dissidents in Texas—never happened, or that Obama never came to take everyone's guns, or that he never tried to seize a third term in office. The list goes on.

As Cavuto well demonstrated, another person with no interest in correcting the record is the president:

It's not what you're omitting, Mr. President. It is what you keep stating and never correcting.

Cavuto cited Trump's delusional fantasies about voter fraud in various states. There is no evidence for any of them, and on a functional basis, they have been disproven. But he will never admit he was wrong or attempt to provide his legion of followers with accurate information. That is not to his benefit, in his view. The president and his allies seize on corrections as evidence the media is fake and out to push an agenda. In fact, they are evidence of the opposite, and the president's behavior shows why.

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A Fox News host can only go so far, though, and Cavuto never strayed over a certain line. "None of this makes what you say Fake," he assured the president. But this just isn't true. There is no more prolific purveyor of Fake News than the president and his White House. The level of shamelessness with which he and his staff peddle baseless rumors, conspiracy theories, illogical fantasies and old-fashioned lies is unprecedented. If the reporting on Trump's Position Reversal on the Stormy Daniels is anything to go on, the mainstream media has failed, still, to come to grips with this.

There was a ray of hope, however, in the form of a tweet from ABC News' chief political analyst:

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We in the media should not report anything this President or White House says on anything including economy, North Korea, Iran, etc until it is independently verified. Our default position should be that what they are saying is likely not true. — Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) May 3, 2018

At some point, writers and correspondents and editors and producers at real news organizations will have to accept that the White House is not concerned with what is true and what is false, only what serves their purposes. This is, of course, the charge they level against the media. But as Cavuto reminded us, Trump still contends that 3 million people voted illegally in the last election. He will never say otherwise—until he stands up tall and says, loudly and indignantly, that he never claimed 3 million people voted illegally.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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