Susan Page

USA TODAY

President Trump drew the biggest Inaugural crowd in history — except he didn’t. President Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the campaign — except there’s no evidence that he did. Trump fired FBI director James Comey because the deputy attorney general concluded he had mishandled the Hillary Clinton email investigation — except now the president says it was his decision alone and cites the Russia investigation as one of the reasons.

On issues big and small, substantive and cosmetic, the Trump White House has failed to give accurate accounts of what happened until photographs, records, reporting and, in some cases, the president's own words provide a new version of the facts. Even when confronted with evidence, the president and his spokespeople don’t always acknowledge the need to correct a falsehood.

This doesn’t seem to bother Trump.

“It is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!” he tweeted Friday with apparent good cheer, then mused about canceling the daily press briefing. Later, press secretary Sean Spicer didn't make it clear whether the president was serious or joking about upending a fixture of White House operations since the Harding administration, and he wouldn't expand on a separate tweet from Trump suggesting that he might have recorded his conversation with Comey.

Concerned or not, Trump now faces the biggest credibility gap of any president since at least Richard Nixon during Watergate (a scandal that forced his resignation) or Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War (a spiraling controversy that prompted him not to seek a second full term). For LBJ, it was the disparity between the official version of the war's course and the reporting from the front lines that added the phrase “credibility gap” to the political lexicon.

"I wrote a book about what goes into making great presidential leadership, and one of the elements I said was credibility, was trust," said presidential historian Robert Dallek, author of Hail to the Chief: The Making and Unmaking of American Presidents as well as biographies of Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Nixon and Johnson. "When presidents lose the trust of the public, I think it's very difficult if not impossible for them to govern this country."

On Trump, Dallek warned, "His credibility is very shaky."

Read more:

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The controversies have taken a toll on Americans' views of Trump. In a Quinnipiac Poll this month, those surveyed said by 61%-33% that Trump wasn't honest. That is a 28-percentage-point underwater rating on honesty, double the 14-point divide he scored in the same survey at the beginning of the year.

The poll was taken before the latest and most spectacular example: the decision to fire Comey. At the White House Tuesday night, Spicer said the decision had been made by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who had criticized Comey's handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails; Trump had accepted Rosenstein's recommendation. Vice President Mike Pence repeated that explanation to reporters on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.

But on Thursday, Trump told NBC's Lester Holt that he had decided to fire Comey regardless of what Rosenstein recommended, and he cited a different reason. "When I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won."

Trump's decision to dismiss the FBI director has rattled official Washington, stoked what Democrats already call the "resistance," and fueled reporting that the president is about to shake up his senior White House staff — though the fiercest controversies have centered on the president's statements, not those of his aides. Questions about whether Trump will stand by his word imperil the administration's efforts to negotiate a health-care compromise and a major tax package with members of Congress. And it casts a cloud over his first international trip, which begins this week.

The firestorm over Comey's ouster comes on the heels of lower-voltage complaints about ways in which the Trump White House has reduced disclosure and transparency. The administration has ended the Obama White House practice of regularly releasing logs of White House visitors. The White House barred the U.S. press pool from taking photos at the beginning of the president's meeting with Russian officials last week. The press shop even refuses to disclose whether Trump is playing golf during his weekend visits to his golf clubs.

"President Trump has sacrificed his credibility (with) his outrageous disregard for the truth and his penchant for outrage," said Ron Klain, a senior White House aide in the Clinton and Obama administrations. "It will be sorely missed when a crisis comes."

Klain called Trump "a polarizing president with a dubious relationship to facts" who has created "an environment where his supporters believe him even when he is lying, and more and more Americans won’t believe him even if he is telling the truth."

Credibility is a precious political resource, said Frank Donatelli, a Republican consultant and political director in the Reagan White House.

"Presidential credibility can enhance public approval, as in 'he acts on what he believes,'" Donatelli said, noting that personal popularity helped Reagan and other presidents succeed even when support for specific policies was lower. That's one reason a president's approval rating is so closely watched. "A president's influence over events is directly related to his standing with the voting public. Members of Congress will be more deferential to a president with strong public support."

Trump's rating seems relatively stable, ticking down just a bit in two surveys taken since FBI furor. His approval rating was 39% in both the Gallup and NBC/Wall Street Journal polls posted Sunday. That is a historic low for a modern president at this early point in his presidency, but it's just about where he has stood through the first 100 days of his tenure.

Trump allies also take comfort in the low approval ratings for those pressing the questions. Just 34% approve of the job congressional Democrats are doing, according to the Quinnipiac Poll. By 58%-37%, they disapprove of the way the news media cover Trump. But an even bigger majority, 65%-31%, disapprove of the way Trump talks about the news media. And by 57%-31%, they trust the news media over Trump to tell the truth about important issues.

On this, and other issues, there is a sharp partisan divide. Among Democrats, 91% trust the news media more. Among Republicans, 72% trust Trump more. Independents trust the news media by more than 2-1, 57%-27%. The survey of 1,078 people, taken May 4-9, has a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Credibility has damaged officials beyond Trump. Based on assurances from then-national security adviser Michael Flynn, Vice President Pence assured Americans that Flynn hadn't discussed U.S. sanctions in a conversation with Russian officials before the Inauguration; when that turned out to be untrue Flynn was fired.

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) was forced to step down from leading the panel’s investigation into Russian meddling in the U.S. election after he became enmeshed in White House attempts to justify Trump’s debunked accusation of illegal wiretapping by Obama during the campaign.

Then there's Spicer, regularly dispatched to defend Trump's most provocative assertions, who was the target of a brutal parody on NBC's Saturday Night Live.

"Trump is innocent," the Spicer figure, portrayed by Melissa McCarthy, told a White House briefing in her role as Spicer. "How do we know? Because he told us so. Period." When she uses a motorized White House podium to track down Alec Baldwin, playing Trump, at his New Jersey golf course, she demands, "Have you ever told me to say things that aren't true?"

"Only since you started working here," Baldwin replied.