Doubling Down on Lies

David Leonhardt doubled down this week on the principle of false balance coupled with the technique of counting lies (instead of evaluating lies) as an analytical tool.

The original NYT list of "Trump's Lies" appeared as a June 23, 2017. 'opinion' piece -- even though the determination of whether a statement is true or false and, if false, is therefore a lie is arguably an objective exercise. Certainly, in this case, the author is at least implicitly claiming objectivity by proceeding with the lie count. The original piece openly asked for input from readers regarding appropriate next steps. Our Counting Lies post criticized the effort on two counts:

1) Evaluation of Trump's lies has nothing to do with presidents Bush or Obama. Going down that rabbit hole distracts from important issues and, but once again using balance as the yardstick for evaluation, automatically leans toward normalization of Trump and improves the chances that false equivalence of Trump with others will rule the day.

2) A better analysis would categorize the lies by their apparent nature and quality. The NYT is a group of slow learners. In September 2016, the NYT referred to Trump as "mischievous" even while asserting that they would finally start calling a lie a lie.

Despite the flaws in the NYT approach to objectively describing Trump's extreme behavior, Leonhardt has updated the list of lies by comparisons with Obama in "Trump's Lies vs. Obama." Though the list he compiles clearly ranks Trump with a high lie count compared with the count they compile for Obama, proceeding with this exercise is particularly troubling.

First of all, this exercise was a response to Trump supporters who "didn’t doubt that he[Trump] sometimes bent the truth. But they thought he was no worse than other recent presidents, and they challenged The Times to do the same exercise for a president other than Trump."

But is there any doubt that Trump supporters who believe that Trump's lies are few and innocent will be moved by such an exercise? Of course not. They will either ignore it or look for one or two real or perceived flaws in Leonhardt's Obama lie count and use that "finding" as a cudgel to reject the entire exercise as "biased" in favor of Obama. But the goal of distracting from useful evaluation of Trump's fundamental mendacity will have been achieved by those Trump supporters. Leonhardt does not even seem aware that this Trump supporters criticism fits into the Deny/Distract/Deflect/Accuse framework (see Birtherism as a Service or All Tactics All the Time) recently highlighted by John Oliver as "whataboutism".

Additional thoughts:

To David Leonhardt - why not tell the Trump supporters to ask Fox News to count up the Obama lies if they are so interested in them. My guess is that Fox would not do it because that is not how they plan  this game. Fox News identifies a "fact" that motivates strong emotions of hate and fear of liberals and countervailing "facts" to motivate feelings of patriotism  and loyalty to conservatives.

What if Trump were the first president and lied all the time?  For lack of predecessors, would you compare him to King George? Or would you wish there had been other presidents for purposes of comparison because you would have no idea how to assess whether or not his constant lies is a serious concern?

Sorry, but Obama appeared at all times to be a president who was sincere and spoke at length pointing to facts in support of his statements. If his statements did not hold up, then he was in a good position to make corrections and generally did. Anyone who could not see that will not be moved. He was also disadvantaged by a relentless unfair series of attacks on his character. Fortunately, his character was so solid that those attacks were ultimately ineffective. Trump, on the other hand, has a long history of only thinking of himself and acting on his own behalf, and, as Steve Schmidt has been saying, "Trump lies 100% of the time."