Brandolini’s Bullshit Asymmetry Principle:
Bullshitting (in the technical sense of lying for lying’s sake) takes way more time and effort to refute than it does to employ. Serial liar (bullshitting) politicians, like Trump, enjoy a strategic communication advantage; until they’ve completely undermined their own trust, all they have to do to remain in power is continue to lie, forcing others to spend inordinate amounts of time and energy fact-checking, hours or days past when the last lie was told, always playing catch-up with the next.
Furthermore, partisans can pick and choose which lies they believe, and partisanship is so strong right now, that it takes a lot of lies, proven to be lies (and ones important to partisans), to break that trust. But it’s worth the effort, especially when the bullshitter is the president of the United States (and doubly when he’s a fascist, undermining our democracy), so here’s a good list for the rest of this campaign season, a la a tweet thread from Daniel Dale, when he attended one of Trump’s rallies a week ago:
And here’s A handy guide to Donald Trump’s most-frequent campaign rally lies and false claims. There are some real whoppers, but you’ll see a lot more mundane claims, like inflating job numbers. And they all matter, because they’re part of a continuous smokescreen, to distract us from what he’s really trying to do: soak the American taxpayer for himself, rig the economy even more in the favor of the wealthy, and create a white ethnostate.