Worse Than a Liar

[kentuck]

https://newrepublic.com/article/147504/worse-liar-trump-lies-trudeau

<snip>
President Donald Trump is under attack for a private speech on Wednesday where he admitted to making up details about the U.S.-Canada trade balance in a conversation with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. According to Trump, Trudeau told him that Canada does not have a trade deficit with the U.S.—which is true—but Trump insisted otherwise. “I said, ‘Wrong, Justin, you do.’ I didn’t even know,” Trump said during the fundraiser in Missouri. “I had no idea. I just said, ‘You’re wrong.’”

“Bragging about lying to an ally,” lamented Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin. “How stupid. How Trump.” Jesse Ferguson, a former spokesman for Hillary Clinton, tweeted, “President of The United States brags to his donors that he lies to foreign leaders of allied nations.” “When people try to tell you that Trump doesn’t lie,” wrote Mother Jones’ Mark Follman, “remind them that Trump told a bunch of his donors straight-up that he does, even to the leader of one of our closest allies.”

But these characterizations of Trump as a liar aren’t quite accurate, or at least don’t provider the full picture. Trump’s comments illustrate instead that he’s a full-fledged bullshit artist. There’s a difference: Lying involves conscious deception, whereas bullshitting is a more insidious attempt to blur the lines between truth and falsehood.

“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth,” the philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote in his 2005 book On Bullshit. “Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all bets are off.... He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.”

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

1. Just when you thought BLOTUS couldn't make himself look like a bigger idiot...

he takes his idiocy to a whole new level.

[ginnyinWI]

2. He will say whatever is expedient for himself at any given moment.

Truth is a meaningless concept when you are the center of your own universe.

That man has no morals. He's a flu virus that the nation has caught and that most are waiting to get over. I think the ones who voted for him have a particularly bad case of the virus and take the longest to get over it.

[kentuck]

3. And when should someone believe a pathological liar?

The answer is "Never".

[world wide wally]

4. He is a fucking liar.... No bullshit.

[TreasonousBastard]

5. I have been saying this for a long time-- "lying" has a purpose and not...

always an evil one. The classic "Does this make my ass look big?" can only be answered by the same sort of lie that you would tell your young child if she asks if her dead dog is going to heaven. Truth and sense often take a back seat to assuaging feelings.

"Did you take the money?" or "Are you screwing your secretary?" are also often answered by far less honorable lies, but still lies to a purpose.

Bullshitting, however, is simply spewing words simply for the sake of spewing words.

Trump does have a penchant for both, and possibly doesn't really know the difference himself.

[kentuck]

6. 100% of Trumps comments are either lies or bullshit or both.

He is incapable of telling the truth. The sooner Americans realize that fact, the better for our nation.

[Orsino]

7. There is absolutely no art to his bullshit.

It's all bluffing. He wants to seem like someone with intelligence and talent, so he opens his word-hole and syllables come out, none of which withstand a moment's scrutiny.