Trump's pride in his lies makes him even much more dangerous than we thought

Donald Trump tells lies. That's hardly news, of course. And certainly not fake news. According to The Washington Post, which is assiduously keeping count, the 45 US President has uttered or tweeted more than 2,000 false or misleading statements since swaggering into the White House. That's an average of around five a day.

But does Trump spew this waterfall of lies knowingly? Or could it be that he is just chronically ignorant and obscenely intellectually lazy? Or is it perhaps a case of cognitive impairment, as suggested in a recent book? Is Trump mentally unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality? A leaked audio recording of Trump recalling his talks with the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at a private fundraising event in Missouri gave us a pretty strong steer on this. Trump bragged to his audience that he asserted something to the Canadian leader that he simply didn't know was true or not.

"I said, 'Wrong, Justin, you do [have a trade surplus with the US].' I didn't even know ... I had no idea. I just said, 'You're wrong.'" In other words, Trump has admitted that he lies knowingly and shamelessly. Indeed, the Missouri audio demonstrates that he's not merely shameless, but proud of his untruths. There are problems with psychological diagnoses from a distance, but it's worth noting that pathological lying and immunity to feelings of guilt are traits associated with psychopaths.

Is there anything more to be said about Trump's estrangement from truthfulness? Yes. And it's the fact that Trump is a political liar. The lies are not simply intended to deceive; they are, as the Russian dissident Masha Gessen has argued, a brute assertion of the primacy of power over truth. They indicate a conception of power that simply does not recognise the authority of truth.

Trump says something that is untrue, that people around him know is untrue, that he himself knows to be untrue, and which he knows they know is untrue. Why? As a statement of his authority and the absolute nature of it. As the Missouri audio also reveals, the job of his aides, when a lie is told by their master, is to locate some evidence that his assertions are, in fact, correct.

By forcing his spokespeople and subordinates to repeat, defend or rationalise his blatant falsehoods in public, he destroys their own reputations and their own sense of self-respect. This may, or may not, be intended as a means of binding them more closely to him. Given the rate at which personnel have been departing the Trump administration, it has arguably not been particularly effective in that regard.

Yet there’s ample evidence that Trump is also a calculated and manipulative liar. The timing of his tweets makes it plain that he frequently uses lies to create media frenzies, to distract from other uncomfortable stories, to whip up his voter base. His lies are thus a form of propaganda, of disinformation.

It's impossible not to summon to mind, writing all this, the repeated insistence of an apparently guilt-free Boris Johnson that the UK sends £350m a week to the European Union's coffers, even when the UK statistics watchdog has explicitly told him that this totemic Brexiteer claim is simply wrong.

How to cover shameless, political and calculating liars and propagandists such as Trump (and, on dark days, Johnson) represents an immense and complex challenge for the media. The instinct is to seize on the lie, to "fact check" an individual assertion and demonstrate why it's wrong. I've written plenty of such debunking articles myself of Trump's various statistical abuses.

Yet if the objective of the lie is to distract, to dictate the news agenda, one can't get away from the fact that this risks dancing to Trump's tune.

And what of the impact on the public? Some psychological research hints at a "backfire effect", where people become more entrenched in their wrong convictions, perhaps fed to them by Trump, when they are exposed to contrary evidence.

The validity of this finding has been contested by other researchers. But nevertheless, it's pretty clear that truth in America is under the cosh, led by the assaults of its liar-in-chief. Trump's US support base has not grown since the 2016 election, but it has not collapsed either.

Heartbreaking as it is for liberals to acknowledge, John Stuart Mill's classic philosophical justification for freedom of expression - "the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth [is] produced by its collision with error" - looks shaky in the face of the empirical evidence of recent years.

So what should the media's response be? The idea that journalists should simply report blatant lies neutrally along with contrary information, and let audiences make up their own minds, feels to most journalists like a dereliction of a fundamental responsibility to inform and be fair to the public.

One temptation is to take the lies for granted, to focus on policies. I confess I've felt that urge at times, when Trump comes out with yet more mendacious rubbish. Is one more debunking really going to achieve anything? But that’s surely an abdication of responsibility, too. For lies on this scale and with this malevolent intent corrupt the public realm and erode our democracy, which ultimately relies on some acceptance of shared truth.

They are an authoritarian attack on pluralist institutions - one that's disturbingly familiar from the last century of world history. "Contempt for truth goes hand in hand with political oppression," observes Lee McIntyre of Boston University.

However the media deals with them, we must never deceive ourselves into thinking that the brazen lies of Trump - and the lies of any politician in an open and democratic society - are harmless.

Liberals can still use facts to defeat populist ignorance

This is, as has been widely noted, a bleak time for enlightenment values. In the face of a populist tide, a feeling of pessimism has gripped many liberals about the ability of logic, reason and evidence to influence the wider public.

Discussion often turns to psychological research showing that when ordinary people are presented with facts in the context of a political debate it has little impact. There's growing chatter about a "backfire effect", where rebutting misconceptions actually serves to entrench falsehoods, perhaps by making the myths more salient. Thus, fact-checking exercises by the media become, at best, as a waste of time ("leftliberal comfort food" in the words of Rob Ford of Manchester university). At worst, they're counterproductive.

Technology doesn't seem to be helping. Social media helps people to herd themselves into informational silos, where they only hear what they want to hear, and inflates ideological bubbles. Traditional sources of authority are no longer respected. We're warned that "elites" telling people they are wrong is patronising.

Some argue that describing overtly racist opinions and policies as racist only serves to drive the alienated masses further into the populist corral.

So what's to be done? How can progressive politicians and experts get across the facts behind politicised subjects, whether it is the economic impact of immigration, the circumstances of welfare recipients, the science behind climate change, the safety of vaccines or the overall benefits of free trade? How can we ensure that political decisions are taken and votes cast not on the basis of prejudice and myth, but with at least some regard to evidence and serious analysis? Perhaps liberals should forget facts and instead to go with the populist flow. In this view of the world the best hope for progressives lies in pandering to popular "feelings" but trying to steer the ship of policy in a vaguely progressive direction.

But this prescription is dangerous. When gross fallacies in public debate go unchallenged the fallacies don't die out, they spread. The cancer metastasises. A culture of anti-intellectualism is liable to be a breeding ground for bigotry and intolerance. And in any case the populist wolves are likely to prove rather better at this game than the progressive sheep in wolves' clothing. Moreover, there's a better way. There are other academic studies that point to ways that liberals can try to turn the tide.

Christina Boswell and James Hampshire have highlighted how the public discourse on immigration in Germany was transformed between 2000 and 2008. Social Democratic politicians used familiar arguments about the economic benefits of immigration. But they did this alongside a campaign to promote positive narratives about immigration and its place in the country's history to counter entrenched perceptions of Germany being kein Einwanderunglsand ("not a country of immigration"). This twin approach largely succeeded in changing attitudes, flowering in the generous position taken by Angela Merkel's Christian Democrat government towards Syrian refugees in the summer of 2015.

By contrast in the UK, at the same time, Labour began to talk up "British jobs for British workers" and never seriously rebutted the dominant and dismal narrative of the tabloid press about immigration being an economic burden and culturally corrosive, arguably helping to set the scene for the current bout of selfharming Brexit-related xenophobia.

Eric Kaufmann of Birkbeck College London points out that the strength of far-right parties in Europe is roughly correlated with the size of a nation's Muslim community. But polling shows that Europeans are often wildly misinformed about the rate of Muslim immigration and fertility.

Public information campaigns might well help. Research by Alexis Grigorieff, Christopher Roth and Diego Ubfal showed that when a large sample of people in the US and Europe were told the actual share of immigrants in the country - rather than relying on their own often grossly exaggerated estimates - they became less likely to argue that there were too many incomers. The facts do, it seems, get traction.

There are other sources of hope. In a recent essay Tim Harford of the Financial Times has highlighted research which suggests that a way to open peoples' minds to evidence and bypass politically-motivated reasoning is to appeal to their sense of non-political scientific curiosity. It's not simple, but it can be done.

All of this suggests that a counsel of despair about the persuasive potential of facts and evidence is unwarranted; people can still be amenable to reason. Progressive politicians, researchers and liberal activists should not be laying down their enlightenment weapons in the face of angry and destructive populism, but rather wielding them more effectively.