“All baseball players hit baseballs. Why are we focused on Babe Ruth just because he hit more than most?”
John Kerry is denying flying in a private jet because his wife was the one who owned it, not him and besides they sold it at some point [0]. Trump would just claim there is no jet, that he only travels by bicycle, that everyone knows he has the best jets and that the questioners were low energy. Then the fact checkers say Kerry was telling the truth. Cue the eye rolls from Trump voters - at least Trump is not trying to insult everyone's intelligence. He just up and lies in straightforward and entertaining fashion. Assuming the sentences parse enough to work out what he technically said. But at least there isn't some stupid game where we all have to pretend he was being honest.
[0] https://fortune.com/2023/07/13/john-kerry-stupid-lie-private...
But I think it's more than just being interesting/entertaining. I think Trump also tells lies that a large number of people want to believe.
But this may be changing. Trump's lies aren't nearly as entertaining anymore. "I won in 2020" is like, "Really? You're still on that? Get some new material." "All these court cases are just incompetent people, jealousy, conspiracy, and election interference!" Yeah, right. You're saying the same thing over and over (as the court cases keep coming). It's been getting repetitive. There's nothing new there any more.
There’s an old joke about it even:
“How do you know when a politician is lying?
When their lips are moving.”
There are so many legitimate things to attack Trump on but it’s ridiculous to claim that he lies more than other politicians.
The fact checkers stopped when Biden was elected, but that isn’t because Biden stopped lying. He’s a known serial plagiarist and liar with over 50 years in political office and he has been lying the entire time.
They don't do that with other politicians. We don't have data on them.
So we, rage-consumers of media that we are, all think Trump is the biggest, fattest liar of them all.
There is no identical dataset for other presidents (generally because they haven't lied enough at this level to warrant a dedicated database), but luckily, you can see that Trump's lie count goes up at a fairly steady rate week-to-week/month-to-month (i.e. there's no stretch of time where he stopped lying), so a little project for you would be:
- Go back to any other modern day president from the past 50 or so years, whoever you'd like to compare
- Pick 1 week or 1 month randomly, and pull up all their public statements or press coverage
- Then count the # of lies for that week or month, and extrapolate a comparison
I think you'll quickly find that it does not compare to Trump's overall average rate of 21 documented public facing lies per day (obviously we are not able to count private conversations).