It is hardly even a story now when the president lies—which is, of course, the point. The steady stream of false claims has broken the great dam of democratic politics: the idea there is some set of facts that together make up observable reality, and that we must acknowledge that reality and work off of it to run our society. The world's most powerful man does not subscribe to any of that, and it has allowed him to run roughshod over the media and the justice system and the republic itself, expanding and multiplying his false claims about the world around us in the hopes that someday, we'll all just give up resisting him. With his primal cunning, he can sense there is some point at which we will begin to drown in it all.

There was another reminder of the sheer scale of the problem on Monday thanks to the Washington Post, which found Donald Trump, American president, has made 10,000 false claims in public since taking office. Well, it's up to 10,111 claims now, a feat our dear leader accomplished in just 828 days. That's thanks to a period over the last seven months in which the president has truly upped his game. Over the first 100 days, Trump averaged five false claims a day in public. This was remarkable if you consider what days might be like if you lied to people five times a day in your own life. But recently, Trump has jacked it up to 23 (twenty-three!) a day.

The Post highlights some events that, from the standpoint of complete and utter truthlessness, really defy belief:

Once he really gets going, there are times he's saying something that's clearly false once every minute. And then there's the Presidential Twitter Feed. The president has upped his output on the face of things—he threw up more than 50 tweets in one 24-hour period last week—and, along with that, the output of things that are not fucking true.

The president’s constant Twitter barrage also adds to his totals. All told, the president racked up 171 false or misleading claims in just three days, April 25-27. That’s more than he made in any single month in the first five months of his presidency.

The president's relentless lying will be a fascination for historians and psychologists for decades. What does it say about his mental state? What does it say about our society that he was able to get away with it? Does his success speak to his own peculiar talents, or is the infrastructure of our democracy just far weaker than we'd long assumed?

It's a question worth asking, because things are getting more and more dangerous. The president held a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, this weekend, and the ensuing lies went to an entirely new level. At one point, Trump referred to the departing senior officials at the Justice Department and the FBI—many of whom he defenestrated as they led an investigation into his presidential campaign—as "scum."

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Wow -- Trump refers to the FBI and DOJ leaders he's purged from government as "scum" pic.twitter.com/mkjiWZ68cp — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 28, 2019

The president has used the word "scum" before to describe the press, and it is no coincidence. He has routinely engaged in dehumanizing rhetoric when it comes to immigrants or other groups he's cast as the great villains in his dark and twisted American story, where The Other is banging on the gates and has the help of some shadowy cabal within. The president is a vector for the most vile impulses of the American character, the true embodiment of our very worst tendencies. And make no mistake: when people on the far fringes of society hear the President of the United States speak this way, they feel empowered to take action. A man in Florida explicitly supported Trump and sent mail bombs to his perceived enemies.

That goes for the insane lies Trump pushed about abortion, too.

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Trump falsely claims Democrats support murdering babies.



"The baby is born, the mother meets w/the doctor. They take care of the baby. They wrap the baby beautifully. Then the doctor and mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby."



The crowd respond w/angry boos pic.twitter.com/DgVgw5IZ0f — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 28, 2019

This is not real. It is the latest batshit twisting of what Virginia Governor Ralph Northam said a few months back—before it emerged he'd once worn blackface. But it will become real in the minds of far too many people now that the president said it from the rally podium. And we know, from recent history, that people will kill in defense of an ideology they call "pro-life." It is not just dangerous for the president to speak this way. It is incitement.

But that did not stop The Mainstream Media from treating this statement from a man who now makes 20-plus false claims a day as another unfortunate slip-of-the-tongue from an otherwise normal politician. Well, that's what the Paper of Record did, anyway.

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Fact check: At a rally on Saturday in Green Bay, Wisconsin, President Trump revived an inaccurate refrain about doctors “executing babies” https://t.co/Xc6JyVg5wh — The New York Times (@nytimes) April 28, 2019

"Revived an inaccurate refrain?" Fucking seriously? No one expects The New York Times to call this insane dangerous bullshit, but this sounds like he did a bad cover of a Rolling Stones song.

Apparently it needs to be said again: the president is not playing your game. He is William Webb Ellis, the English boarding school student who, during a soccer match, picked up the ball and started running with it in the apocryphal tale of how rugby was born. The president does not believe in the concept of truth. The truth is whatever you can get enough people to believe, which just happens to be whatever benefits him most right now. Every story about something the president says should be framed in a way that reflects how often what he says is not true. That includes from Objective News Outlets, who in their vain quest to avoid charges of bias from the right have long allowed nonsense and outright propaganda to flourish in the discourse.

What's true is true. What the president says is often not. Say that.

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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