We've well and truly entered the Say Anything Era. The president has proven himself to be largely impervious to shame, and completely unconcerned with what is true with respect to observable reality. The truth is whatever you can get enough people to believe. Or, if you can't get them to believe it, you can just bury the actual truth in an avalanche of false and conflicting claims. It's hard for the average person to tell which way is up in a maelstrom of bullshit. That's led to a series of increasingly Orwellian public proclamations, not least when the president told a crowd, "What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening."

He's deputized his attorneys in the Russia probe to, like his political spokespeople, carry on this mission. Chief among them is Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who's no longer particularly welcome at Yankee games. Last week, we caught Giuliani on CNN explaining that facts are "in the eye of the beholder," a stunning distillation of Trumpworld's attitude towards the truth. But on Meet the Press Sunday, he decided even that was too vague:

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WATCH: Rudy Giuliani tells @chucktodd that he doesn’t want President Trump to be caught in a perjury trap by speaking with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. #MTP #IfItsSunday



Giuliani: “Truth isn’t truth" pic.twitter.com/SChZbfgAOX — Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) August 19, 2018

"Truth isn't truth."

Again, this is a neat summary of Trump and his associates' attitude towards reality. The regime has become so untethered from the basic principles of life in a democratic republic—that there is an objective reality we can observe and mostly agree on, and that we make decisions based on this assessment of what is happening around us—that they feel comfortable just going Full Orwell.

Giuliani later said he was trying, in yet another display of extremely bad lawyering, to construct a he-said-she-said:

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My statement was not meant as a pontification on moral theology but one referring to the situation where two people make precisely contradictory statements, the classic “he said,she said” puzzle. Sometimes further inquiry can reveal the truth other times it doesn’t. — Rudy W. Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) August 20, 2018

That's not an uncommon legal strategy, and the argument Trump should just cooperate as a witness if he has nothing to hide is naive in the context of how prosecutions work in our justice system. But this is not a classic he-said-she-said, because there is rock-solid evidence that there is exactly zero reason to believe the word of Donald Trump, American president. The Washington Post assessed that Trump made 4,229 false claims in his first 558 days in office, or 7.6 a day. The man will lie about anything. Why would anyone believe what he says about a criminal investigation into himself and his associates?

And why would anyone believe a word Giuliani says? This is the same Giuliani who said on national television that Trump asked FBI Director James Comey to give Michael Flynn "a break," then went back on national television a month later to say the conversation never happened. That question is at the heart of whether the president obstructed justice. Later in the appearance Sunday, Giuliani seemed determined to prove his claim that "truth isn't truth."

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This is insane.



In admitting the purpose of the Trump Tower meeting was to get dirt on Clinton, Giuliani also says they didn't know Veselnitskaya "represented the Russian government" (The email setting up the meeting literally said it was on behalf of the Russian government) pic.twitter.com/egd7svawgS — Robert Maguire (@RobertMaguire_) August 19, 2018

You'd hope for more pushback from host Chuck Todd here, though maybe he was taken aback by the rapid-fire bad-faith claims. Giuliani openly admitted Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort took the meeting with a lawyer at Trump Tower because she was offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. He tried to paint this as quotidian political chicanery by suggesting any candidate's staff would do the same. What he tried to bury—and which is part of the established historical record—is that Trump Junior was told in an email setting up the meeting that it was "part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump." Junior himself tweeted out the emails.

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Here is page 4 (which did not post due to space constraints). pic.twitter.com/z1Xi4nr2gq — Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 11, 2017

Did you notice the subject of the email? "Russia - Clinton - private and confidential."

To add insult to injury, Giuliani also tried to claim they didn't even know the lawyer was Russian. He also trotted out their original excuse that they didn't get anything, as if attempted bank robbery isn't a crime. (Also, there's no evidence backing the claim they didn't get anything, and again, there's no reason to believe them when they say they didn't.) Again, it's a hurricane of falsehoods and excuses and countervailing lines of reasoning meant to confuse and distract the public from simple facts at the heart of this case. It's almost an attempt to make Giuliani's claim that truth isn't truth...true.

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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