1. United States
2. Fla.
3. Letter

The Liar-in-Thief “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” -Mark Twain There have been dishonest presidents before. There have been presidents who concealed scandals, manipulated intelligence, broke promises, distorted their records and treated the truth as an inconvenient piece of furniture to be moved out of the way when company arrived. But never in the history of this country have we watched a president lie with the frequency, confidence and sheer theatrical commitment of Donald J. Trump. Trump doesn’t simply tell lies. He builds condominiums inside them, hangs gold curtains over the windows, puts his name above the entrance and charges admission. His administration’s relationship with the truth is roughly the same as an arsonist’s relationship with a smoke detector: it is an irritating obstacle that must be disabled before the real work can begin. The frightening part is no longer merely that Trump lies. The frightening part is that he appears to believe whatever he is saying at the precise moment he says it. Reality, in Trump’s mind, is apparently determined by whatever makes him look richest, smartest, strongest, most beloved or least responsible. If a fact flatters him, it is unquestionably true. If it embarrasses him, it is fake news. If a statistic contradicts him, the statistic is corrupt. If an election rejects him, the election was stolen. If a court rules against him, the judge is crooked. If an expert corrects him, the expert is incompetent. If the entire observable universe refuses to cooperate, then apparently the universe has developed a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. What a remarkably convenient mental arrangement: the man is never wrong because everything proving him wrong is automatically part of the conspiracy against him. Trump continues to claim that the 2020 election was stolen, even though recounts, audits, election officials from both parties, dozens of court proceedings and his own Justice Department found no evidence of fraud capable of changing the result. He recently presented documents that were supposed to prove the greatest electoral crime in American history, and, stop me if you’ve heard this one before, the documents proved no such thing. But evidence has never been the point. Trump’s preferred sequence is beautifully simple: invent the accusation, repeat it until the faithful memorize it, attack anyone who asks for proof and then use their demand for evidence as further evidence of the conspiracy. It is less a political philosophy than the operating system of a carnival barker who has somehow been handed the nuclear codes. He claimed the United States gave Ukraine $350 billion when the actual amount was roughly one-third of that. He claimed millions of dead people were receiving Social Security payments when the government’s own records showed that many were simply listed in an antiquated database without recorded death dates, not collecting checks, buying Cadillacs or living extravagantly at taxpayer expense from beyond the grave. He bragged that he had secured more than $18 trillion in investments, even though his own White House listed approximately $9.7 trillion, much of it consisting of announcements and pledges rather than money actually invested. Apparently, when Trump calculates his achievements, every promised dollar is counted twice, rounded upward and then dipped in gold. He lies about inflation, gas prices, crime, immigration and tariffs. He lies about the size of crowds, the condition of the economy and the popularity of his policies. He claims that foreign countries pay his tariffs when American importers pay them and frequently pass the cost along to American consumers. He boasts about wars he supposedly ended as though the Nobel Peace Prize committee simply misplaced his address. Every disaster becomes somebody else’s responsibility, while every remotely positive development becomes another towering monument to the magnificence of Donald Trump.