Maybe Democrats have decided that, in the era of President Trump, honesty is no longer required. Or maybe Elizabeth Warren is just too insecure to tell the truth about her own life.

Whatever the reason, the Massachusetts senator has built her campaign on a foundation of exaggerations and misrepresentations.

It's common knowledge by now that Warren, one of the top four 2020 Democratic presidential contenders, identified as a Native American, despite being somewhere between 0.1% and 3% Native American and having zero experience in tribal life. If only her misrepresentations began and ended there.

Ask her constituents in Massachusetts and they may remind you that the senator also fibbed when she promised to serve her full Senate term if reelected in 2018. Her 2020 presidential run began a few weeks after she won that election.

Warren has emphasized again and again that her children attended public schools. Her storyline here suffers from a material omission: Her kids also attended private schools. Perhaps this particular misdirection stems from the fact that she’s campaigning against the school choice programs, which would give disadvantaged kids the same opportunities to pursue private education her children had.

Still, we acknowledge that almost all politicians have an inconsistent commitment to the truth — Trump worse than most. But, after catching Warren in what appears to be another instance of misleading the public, her pattern of misleading the public is now disconcerting.

Warren has repeatedly invoked tales of her family’s economic struggles growing up on the campaign trail, in part to sell blue-collar voters on her appeal to middle-class solidarity, although she’s now a multimillionaire. Yet it turns out she may have fibbed once again on her family background. Warren’s brother told the Boston Globe, “My dad was never a janitor," and he said it makes him “furious” that Warren has repeatedly claimed otherwise on the campaign trail.

As the Washington Examiner's Becket Adams noted , “Elizabeth Warren sure does lie a lot about her background.” The real question, though, is why does she mislead the public so often?

Perhaps the senator knows that she can’t sell far-left policy proposals, such as socializing the healthcare system via “Medicare for all” without ample embellishment. So, too, an individual as intelligent as Warren must know that her own background, as a millionaire whose children attended private school, doesn’t fit easily with her soak-the-rich rhetoric.

Maybe she doesn't want to let her voters in on the secret about her campaign: There's nothing populist about it. Commentators often lump Warren's run in with that of Bernie Sanders. But Sanders's base comes from the young and the working class, while Warren's base is mostly highly educated baby boomers who surely feel a warm glow from the belief they are part of some populist uprising.

Sadly, her backers are basically on a slightly remodeled version of the Hillary Clinton Express.

Of course, Warren's defenders will likely point to Trump's long-documented record of being unconcerned with the truth and even outright lying. "Trump is worse!" they cry. They're not wrong on the facts, but this hardly counts as a defense of Warren.

"Whataboutism" is not an actual argument. Surely Democrats must hold their own to higher standards if they're going to make Trump's dishonesty a central issue with any credibility at all.

Democrats and liberal media figureheads have long decried the frosty perception many voters have of Warren as cynical and disingenuous as emblematic of deeply ingrained sexism rather than any actual failing on her part. Some sexist bias against female presidential candidates may certainly exist. But, mostly, Warren has her untruthfulness to blame for all the voters who think she can’t be trusted.