Make Trump's Lying Bad Again

He is often his own worst enemy, but his ability to lie without generating outrage is a big part of how he clings to power.

(Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty Images)

I still find it strange that so many Democrats would choose to make themselves captive to a predator like Donald Trump.

His State of the Union address appears to have been a political failure, except in one regard: Democrats’ biggest liability right now is the (correct) perception that they are weak. People may not, by and large, understand the intricacies of congressional customs and parliamentary procedure. But they have gathered, again correctly, that Democrats are fearful of pushing boundaries in those realms as a means of constraining Trump or delivering better outcomes for the country.

And it isn’t just a vague sense. Democrats have an unusual tendency to broadcast their strategic insights, such that Republicans know exactly how Democrats will react to various provocations, and can design those provocations to reinforce the perception of Democratic weakness.

Democrats will announce, for instance, that they do not intend to take any of Trump’s “bait,” freeing Trump to “bait” them with abuses of power and acts of corruption that Democrats have publicly deemed “distractions,” from kitchen-table issues. He does appalling things, they scarcely respond, rinse, repeat. With respect to the State of the Union address, Democratic leaders announced that members in attendance would maintain dignified silence in response to Trump, tipping Trump and his speechwriters off to the fact that they’d relinquished their freedom of movement. They wouldn’t heckle Trump, they wouldn’t stage a walkout, they wouldn’t publicly dispute his false claims.

Trump knew he could say, in essence, ‘if you like illegal immigrants more than U.S. citizens, stay seated,’ and Democrats would stay seated.

You’ve probably all watched that exchange by now.

To be clear, this wasn’t quite the coup Stephen Miller and gullible members of the political press corps think it was.

It will not “save the midterms” for Republicans and it won’t make the Trump-Miller ethnic-cleansing campaign any less unpopular. But it did drive home the point that Democrats in Congress (or many of them anyhow) can be dog-walked. That they’ve all but given up on the goal of making Trump pay a political price for his aberrant conduct.

He can lie and bluster and lie and bluster, and they will just… sit there, ashen-faced. Why suffer through lies? Why not think instead about what it would take to make the lies a liability for him again, in and of themselves? The foundation of Trump’s political power comprises the tiny minority of Americans who thrill to his lying; who derive sadistic joy from watching him batter his enemies with lies. But he has by no means convinced the majority Americans, including many of the people who voted for him, that lying constantly, about everything, is an acceptable way to behave. That is an untapped source of power.

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As a captive viewer in my own right, I should confess my vulnerability to motivated reasoning. There’s nothing for decent people to like about how Trump comports himself, but I find the quotidian lying—$18 trillion worth of investment! Inherited record inflation!—more exasperating than his graver abuses. There are many ways to fight corruption, there are many ways to fight tyranny. Collective resistance forges solidarity and tends to weaken him. But there’s no really effective way, at this point, for regular people to oppose his Orwellian lying without behaving like scoldy hall monitors. Someone call the fact checkers!

It wasn’t always this way. It only became this way because Trump had more stamina to lie than we did, using our regular methods, to shame him for it.

Before Trump ran, lying the way he does came at a heavy cost. Before he became the GOP’s vice presidential nominee in 2012, Paul Ryan had cultivated an image of rectitude for himself. He’d flattered and charmed a bunch of journalists to launder him a reputation for honesty, humility, and wonkishness. But when he appeared at the RNC to accept his party’s nomination, he went on to tell a bunch of lies, like a more boyish version of Donald Trump.

Opinion-makers were overwhelmingly appalled. A dozen different outlet assigned a dozen different fact checkers to catalog Ryan’s deceptions. “Ryan delivered an almost policy-free speech that included so many misleading lines and flat falsehoods that it led to a quick backlash,” Wonkbloger Ezra Klein, who’d vouched for Ryan in the past, would later write.

I don’t mean to overstate anything. It isn’t as though Ryan and Mitt Romney were cruising to victory until Ryan removed his mask. His performance didn’t cost them the election. But it definitely didn’t help!

Fourteen years later, Trump’s lying is so constant, and the media so fractured, and what’s left of the news business so exhausted by his lying, that people who care about the truth have little recourse.

If we want to toll Trump’s dishonesty, Democrats are our only hope. But their insistence on turning the other cheek doesn't simply make them look weak—it transforms Trump's lying from a liability into an asset, because anyone who earnestly believes the lies are true is unlikely to encounter a corrective—let alone righteous condemnation for his immoral conduct. We suffer the frustration, and are left to wonder: How many persuadable people out there believed what he said?

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People in the Democratic strategic class tell themselves they don’t have to sweat the lying, because it’s unpersuasive. Trump doesn’t even attempt to persuade.

By conventional standards, this is true. But persuasion doesn’t only happen in response to an individual’s words and mien. It occurs in response to atmospherics—such as a scene where Trump defames people sitting right in front of him, and instead of objecting, they stare sullenly at the ground. And in a two-way popularity contest, the only thing that matters is whether Trump is hated more or less than his opponents.

Many liberals conflate the idea that Trump’s lies are unpersuasive with the distinct idea that he pays a price for lying.

I don’t think this is quite right. Trump absolutely pays a price for being boorish and cruel, and, yes, his lying is surely one of the reasons why his detractors despise him. But that can only explain why his support ceiling is so low. The lying is—I would guess—a big part of why his floor is so high.

Trump’s teetering on the brink of political failure. Only 19 percent of Americans claim to be strong Trump supporters at this point. His fan base has shrunk along with his overall support. But it’s not as small as it would be if critics responded to his depravity the way normal people respond to depravity, rather than with “dignified silence.” The curve has shifted slightly, such that more of his supporters are now conflicted. They see the cruelty. They may even feel the pinch of his policies. But so long as every word out of his mouth is an Orwellian lie about his own greatness, or the irredeemability of his enemies, they have something to cling to, something they can choose to believe in lieu of admitting they made a mistake. And we convey to them that this is reasonable. That they are not complicit in evils, because, hey! If he were really that bad, people would revolt.

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Democrats can’t force Trump to be truthful anymore than they can force Republicans as a whole to operate in a spirit of good faith. But they can choose not to play patsy.

Refusing to attend his State of the Union would have been one way. If Democrats retake the House, they can revoke the president’s standing invitation¹ to deliver State of the Union addresses in the future.

But that’s just one night a year. We have 1058 days to go. To really make issue of his untrustworthiness, Democrats would need to convey distrust in all their interactions. To worry less about correcting his lies, lie by lie, and simply cite his promiscuous lying as a basis for non-cooperation.

Trump and the GOP don’t do much legislating, at least not in its intended spirit, so this wouldn’t actually entail subordinating the public interest. If Trump were honest and wanted to work cooperatively with Democrats, it would be faithless of them to refuse on purely partisan grounds—or to pretend Trump was untrustworthy as a false justification for denying him an accomplishment.

But just about every time Democrats have provided Trump their votes, they’ve quickly come to regret it. We see how they’ve have been rewarded for their budget votes: With ever-escalating abuses of power. They funded Trump’s Justice Department only for Trump to try to throw Democratic senators and congressmen in jail. They funded the Defense Department only for Trump to foment war with Iran. Every time they’ve funded his government, he’s turned around and refused to spend the money as instructed, in violation of the law.

So…stop doing that! The GOP’s remaining priorities are largely stunts designed to generate ads and talking points ahead of the election—the legislative equivalent of Trump’s ‘stand if you support citizens over illegals’ gambit.

This tends to send Democrats scrambling, because the GOP’s pretexts are often facially reasonable, and the political system is designed to corner members of Congress on the merits of issues. Democrats are uncomfortable with obstructing for obstruction’s sake, lest a frontline member take heat for being too partisan.

Consider the SAVE Act—the GOP bill that would disenfranchise Americans without passports or ready access to their birth certificates by the millions. Or, as the GOP puts it, a bill that would require voters to present proof of citizenship. What do Democrats really think about the SAVE Act? I don’t rightly know. I suspect they’re sincere in their view that Congress should not be in the business of disenfranchising voters en masse, and that our elections have a high degree of integrity already, so further restrictions are superfluous. But they are at pains to treat this as a meritorious issue rather than a provocation or a trap.

Why? Whatever they think about the merits—even if at some level they have no problem with the idea of proof of citizenship—they are right to suspect that Trump’s plans to change election law can’t be trusted. That he’s advancing an ulterior motive, and they won’t fall for it. They can just say that! We cannot govern with them because they’re not trustworthy. Give us a president who doesn’t lie all the fucking time and we can talk about electoral reforms—but not until then. Not with the guy who tried to steal one election and is openly trying to steal the next one.

Federal judges, unlike members of Congress, were obligated doctrinally to give this administration the benefit of the doubt. To extend the federal government what’s known as the presumption of regularity: Assume honesty. Evaluate every argument on its own terms, as though the lawyers making those arguments can be trusted. Trump exploited and abused that presumption, and the judiciary is thus (finally, though still too tepidly) treating Trump as the contemner that he is.

Democrats in Congress were never obligated to play dumb like this.

I fear we will learn the hard way that the Democrats who helped Republicans pass the Laken Riley Act in 2025 enabled their own ratfucking. Where they could have boycotted the legislation on trustworthiness grounds, they took a dive for political expediency. Now, Democratic candidates who voted for the bill are struggling in their primaries. And next time a Democrat is president, Republican attorneys general will surely exploit the terms of the Laken Riley Act. They will forum shop for right-wing judges who will commandeer immigration enforcement, making it impossible to administer at the federal level.

These Democrats knew everything they needed to know about Trump to suspect that this was a trap. They chose to fall for it anyhow.

1. They technically have to invite him every year, but by custom, Congress treats it as a formality.