Comparison

I am enough of a cynic to generally distrust a lot of what I hear and read.  Part of what has been so distressing over the past year or so has been the way that truth has been utterly beggared in our common discourse. I am not naive enough to believe there was ever a time when politicians did not lie or distort the truth, and I understand that reasonable people can sincerely disagree as to what the truth is, but I have to say, when I read this piece in the NY Times this morning I was surprised.
That Donald Trump is perhaps a pathological liar does not surprise me, the sheer scope of it was what was shocking. Politicians all play fast and loose with the truth, even ones you admire don't always tell it like it is.  Fact checking and the virtual verbatim record of who says what has been in full effect for nearly a decade, thus the journalists behind this article have solid ground for comparing Trump and Obama.  You probably know that I am an admirer of Barack Obama, and you probably also know that I am deeply ashamed of the fact that Donald Trump sits in the oval office.  But, even as a fan of Obama, I knew there were times where he must have deliberately lied or where he spun things in a way that was politically expedient.  I get that, there's no way you get elected to a public office without learning to play politics and there must be a certain amount of moral equivocation and flexibility that comes with holding public office.  I assume that all politicians lie to us, but I also observe that this lying is sort of in the same vein as the lies of advertisers and marketers, it's salesmanship, it's part of the game; caveat emptor. What Trump is doing goes so far beyond the pale that we may have trouble keeping our grounding in the safe territory of sanity and reason.
I recommend reading the Times piece in it's entirety and noticing, especially that they have actually been rather kind to DJT, they have not counted a lot of the salesman type lies that he has told, they forgive him imprecise use of numbers, and things that are simply misleading rather than outright falsehoods.  That latter category is where a lot of politicians and advertisers make their living after all.  But after reading the whole thing, do this, go back and find the side by side column of Obama's lies and falsehoods, committed over the course of a whole eight years, next to Trump's first year.  You don't even have to read them all.  Just scroll down and notice how far you have to scroll after the Obama side has gone blank.
Trump voters have told me that they like him because he "tells it like it is." This is a pretty solid piece of journalism that indicates that assumption is not, in fact, true, or anything like true.  I knew it was bad, I just didn't know it was this bad.  Also worthy of note, is the observation that both Obama, and George W. Bush, when they did tell lies or falsehoods, which were revealed as such, modified their later speech to stop telling those lies.  Trump just keeps repeating demonstrably false ideas, again they were kind and did not include repetitive prevarication.
The mendacity of our current President actually makes me nostalgic for the George W. Bush years, at least he eventually admitted that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Trump would be bragging about how many they found.
Look, I understand if your political perspective is different from mine.  I get that we might disagree about the effectiveness of corporate tax cuts, or the relative merits of single payer healthcare, or even what sorts of gun control measures ought to be instituted, but there is a fundamental attack that is not just about our political system or the liberal/conservative tug of war, it is about our connection to the truth.  In a monarchy or a dictatorship, truth is what the leader says it is, but in a democracy truth needs to be a more sacred ideal.  Our democracy particularly has been built with safeguards against tyranny, even tyranny by a duly constituted majority, certainly against tyranny by a despot.  The truth, self evident truths you might say, are the foundation of our whole system.
To support someone who despises the truth so thoroughly, even if you agree with some or all of his agenda, is utilitarian ethics of the basest sort.  The Dems made that deal with Bill Clinton and it has hamstrung them for nearly 20 years.  One of the Ten Commandments is, "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor," which is perhaps a bit more nuanced than "Thou shalt not lie."  But Trump has actually managed to transgress bountifully upon both sides of that semantic division. Not only that but he has sucked a good number of other people right into the bog of eternal stench along with him.
Everyone crosses the border into untruth from time to time, but Trump, unlike most of us, seems to have decided to set up shop and probably has plans to build a golf resort there sometime soon.