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I feel like this has been going on for a long time, though? He literally lied about the crowd size of his inauguration 8 years ago despite pictures of the actual crowd being widely available.
This is the difference right here. He's getting fact checked instead of journalists just coughing politely when he spews pure nonsense.
Sure, and if they'd have done that from the start 10 years ago maybe things would have developed differently. But at this point everyone already knows he is a pathological liar, and neither his devoted supporters nor the independent/undecideds seem to care.
Yeah this is classic Trump actually, the famous difference between a Bullshitter and a Liar. He's a Bullshitter because he doesn't care what the truth is, he just says whatever will help him. Biden is re-joining the race. Covid restrictions will end by Easter 2020. He won the 2020 election. Obama is a secret Muslim with a fake birth certificate. Just whatever. He gets called out on these things and just sticks with them.
A Liar has a relationship with the truth but says the opposite. A Bullshitter has no relationship with the truth.
But there was at least some subjectiveness to it. Crowd sizes can be relative. The exaggerations he made were akin to the exaggerated benefits of whatever product you see during a television commercial. It was subjective hype, largely opinion based and about things that in the end really don't matter outside of inflating his own ego. When he was saying things that other people did, there was a kernel of truth to them if you dug down far enough. It's just that kernal was intentionally spun, misinterpreted, and twisted well beyond being out of proportion.
"He did XYZ, which is a criminal act that the American people will not stand for and will bring harm to all sorts of families like nobody saw before blah blah blah blah blah." Everything else about it may be a complete lie taken way, way, way out of context. But most of the time, at least XYZ happened. Trump's twisted interpretation of it and the context of it was what Trump used to lie about.
Now he's not even bothering to look for the kernel of truth to latch on to. He's just making it all up. The distinction might be subtle or even irrelevant to most people, but it's there and it's important to point it out because it shows that Trump's normal lies aren't even working any more and he's becoming more and more desperate.
But absolutely wasn't.
Like with just about all of the annoying orange lies, its only really subjective if you don't know the truth and have 0 curiosity.
Ummmm.....that's not how counting works.
I agree with you that a lot of things can be relative. But crowd size at his inauguration is a terrible example of that (no offence). Two rallies in the same location, the number of attendants isn't a relative ephemeral thing, it's a cold-hard-statistic.
Did you count heads? No? Then you're going based on estimations and opinions, which are relative. Maybe the people were standing a little further apart in a previous rally, giving the impression of more people showing up. Maybe there was a section of Trump's crowds that were not properly pictured. Maybe some people hadn't shown up yet when the picture was taken.
Now, none of this actually happened. But unless you have an exact head count of how many people showed up, there's a whole bunch of maybes that Trump could and did hide behind to give him that bare minimum level of plausible deniability; that usual "Well, that's what I was told" schtick he likes to do. That's what he hid behind.
To stay with this example, he's not even trying to do that any more. Now, instead of staying with the purposely vague "largest crowd ever!", he's saying "There were 7,692,814 people, 34 martians, and a partridge in a pear tree. Period." and just hoping people start singing the 12 days of Christmas instead of thinking about what he actually said. He's stopped hiding behind the thin plausible deniability he had and is just spouting out things that are objectively and provably false, hoping his base will continue accepting it as fact and not bothering to check.
If we're sticking with the inauguration example, Trump actually specified a "a million, a million-and-a-half" as his estimate, while the probable reality was more like 300,000 - 600,000^[1]. I believe "largest crowd ever" was Sean Spencer's line.
For more blatant lies that are easily fact-checked he also claimed to have personally witnessed people jumping out of the windows of the skyscrapers during 9/11. Trump's residence is more than four miles away from ground zero. ^[2].
Don't forget when he randomly said low flow toilets were causing problems with water use because people were "flushing 10 to 15 times" ^[3] or when he went on about the noise of windmills causing cancer ^[3].
He has never had any regard for reality and has not had problems making things up out of thin air, going back decades - probably forever.
You do realize we're 'arguing' because we're trying to figure out how big a liar Trump is, right? And you're kinda sorta making me defend Trump here. I'm sending you the bill from my shrink. :P
But with that said, let me put you in a crowd of 600,000 people, except you don't know it's only 600,000 people. I will bet the left body part of your choice that I could tell you there were 600,000 people, a million people, 2 million people, or eleventy billion people and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. I could easily see a bunch of Trump suck-ups telling him there were a million+ people there just to stroke his ego, and I could see a world where Trump believes it. If someone were to put me in front of a sea of humanity that large and tell me there's a million people there, I'd believe it too.
See? Plausible deniability. It's a horrendous exaggeration that's easily fact-checked, but Trump has some wiggle room here.
It was also on TV for several weeks around the clock. Everybody saw footage of people jumping from the towers.
Plus, at the time, he was a real estate tycoon, practically synonymous with the term New York, and had a fleet of various aircraft at his disposal. He could have been in his helicopter flying to Trump Tower before they basically shut the skies down. (He wasn't. But the average person doesn't know that). Heck, a rich New Yorker being in downtown New York and therefore being in a position to see it happen isn't all that unbelievable in the first place. It's a lie, obviously, but again there's loads of plausibile deniability there.
If he were to try to tell that story today, he'd be saying he personally ran in to the buildings with a fire hose himself, and that the Wall St. Journal had an article yesterday that Obama personally funded the entire 9/11 attack.
Lack of water pressure because of decades-old plumbing issues is common in shitty apartments run by slumlords. Not that Trump would know anything about being a ..... oh, right ......
Ok, I surrender. You've got me here. Even I can't Trumpsplain that one away.
I've gotta still mildly disagree. His bullshit used to have at least a whiff of believability and plausible deniability, even if you had to dig several dozen layers to find it. But he's getting older. Cognitive decline, you know. Bless his heart. Now he's just letting the shit spill out of the diaper just to see who'll come by to clean it up.
Yeah I don't really know how we got here. I get stuck into proving a point sometimes, I think it's an autism thing. I don't know. I'll ask my shrink.
I don't know. Like the fake civil war memorial suggests, he's always been perfectly fine with making things up completely I think. Don't forget he invented at least two fake personas to talk as in efforts to talk himself up, too ^[1]. I think he's always had no problem disregarding reality completely. I could probably dig out more examples but like you said earlier - this is turning into a pretty meaningless exercise!
And I definitely do agree that his cognitive abilities seem to be on the decline. In fact it was reported on only earlier today ^[2]
I love your optimism in trying to find signs of desperation, but I just don't think it's true. A quick perusal of the wiki page detailing his false and misleading statements shows his blatant lies with no ground in the truth go back way farther than even his political career.
A personal favourite is the erection of a monument commemorating the so-called River of Blood Civil War event while renovating his golf course - an event that of course never happened on a site where no major battle took place.