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Ironically, I think Trump uses this (maybe unintentionally?) to his advantage. He can say something that sounds outrageous, and is indeed only half-true. But the second somebody goes to do any research to confirm or debunk it, they discover that the actual truth is less bad but... still pretty fucking bad. And now they have that information in their head, and it makes them marginally more likely to vote Trump.
By making his puffed up lies that have a core of truth so ridiculous-sounding, it basically invites someone to be like "NO WAY that is true" and actually look up information.
People here have talked about how Trump lies like a used car salesman whereas most politicians lie like lawyers, and that's an example. Same with him making claims about dogs and cats getting eaten. Maybe not literally true, but a bit of research will bring other things to people's attention.
The problem is that he overdoes it. This strategy might work well if he toned it down just a bit, both in content and in how he talks about it. When he gets heated and raises his voice and starts talking in word salad while randomly inserting these kinds of things into the conversation, like he did in the debate last night against Harris, it just makes him look like a crazy homeless man ranting on a street corner. Personally, it does not bother me, but I do not think that it is the best way to reach swing state voters.
If there's a good way to reach swing state voters then each party would implement it. I'd suggest that the 50k or so undecided voters who will probably end up determining the election outcome aren't going to decide it based on something that would seem rational to an informed voter.
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This strategy is at the heart of Trump's approach to the truth. It presents the media with a difficult dilemma. In response to a lie from him they can either:
(A) Helpfully clarify the grain of truth in what he said and in so doing help Trump use bald lies to manipulate audiences to where he wants them.
(B) Issue a denial of what he said without drilling down deeper, and in so doing fail in their duty to provide basic information audiences are seeking.
Both approaches are journalistic failures. It should be possible to find a middle way but most of the time media orgs struggle to do so. Or can't do so in a way that generates clicks.
As a result, the media orgs that choose route B provide extra ammo for Trump's claims of media bias, while those that choose route A really are tilting the game in his favour.
It's sort of a smart strategy but ends in tears for everyone.
It is notable that Democrat lies do not present the media a similar dilemma, given that we can observe them simply backing those lies to the hilt, unquestioningly, no matter how brazen.
The idea that the media is in any way interested in the truth is, at this late date, entirely unsupportable, and I am not comfortable allowing it to pass unchallenged. The media has now normalized rewriting their own archived output to match Democrat talking points in real-time. Large, well-coordinated lies from the Democrats last decades, result in obvious, devastating real-world outcomes, and generate zero accountability for those responsible. Truth was never a part of this process, and I do not believe that you or any of the other commenters decrying this issue are actually interested in the truth any more than the media is.
I think this is too huge a topic to litigate here but I do think journalists are pretty committed to technical truth-telling, and are moderated somewhat by norms of not being too shameless about their omissions. This immediately opposes them to Trump's different style of deceit.
How might we test this theory?
"Technical truth telling" does not seem like a useful term to me. When a paper declares that Kamala is the border Czar, and then claims that there is no such thing as a Border Czar, and edits the old headlines and articles in an attempt to avoid embarrassment, is this "technical truth telling"? If so, I submit that all statements are true if we allow sufficiently "technical" hair-splitting on the definition of truth, so the term is a fully-general counterargument, relying on selective application for its utility.
Likewise, If the role of the media is to give the public a clearer understanding of the world we live in, and we observe journalists pushing a particular falsehood very hard, and then we observe the portions of the public with the highest trust in those journalists disproportionately believing that falsehood, does that disprove the theory? What if we can show that this has happened repeatedly?
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Ding ding.
An honest press would resolve the problem to a large degree, but an honest press wouldn't be able to shift public perception to where THEY want it.
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…so, motte and bailey as a (formal?) strategy?
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I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but in my case I would absolutely still resent Trump for lying about it. Why not just tell the actual truth? Why should I have to automatically discount any claim he makes by 30%, and go digging around for the 70% that’s true, when instead he could have just said 100% of the truth up front? Why are people giving him a pass for wildly inflating so many of his claims?
I still agree that lying like this is bad and he shouldn't do it, but it doesn't seem like you've interacted with the core of the counterargument. The fact that his statements are exaggerated makes them bait for the media to debunk and therefore signal boost them.
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Do you resent any other politician for their lies?
Anyone who pays attention knows politicians tell tactical lies nonstop.
If you hold Trump to a special standard I think that's ridiculous. Otherwise yeah, resenting the lie is probably the most rational response possible.
As to WHY?
IT WORKS. CONSTANTLY. Because when it comes to politics most people are fully prepared to accept lies from their team.
This is my great frustration. I have the superpower known as "a functioning memory that recalls events older than a week" so I know how much all politicians are lying at all times, and they count on people forgetting or forgiving things that happened too far in the past. And I'm doomed to watch the voting public fall for this every time.
I don't agree that Trump is lying is most cases like this. Almost worse, it's that he doesn't care to know if it's the truth. It sounds good to him to say, and the truth of it is irrelevant.
How many things does Trump say during debates and his speeches that are merely poorly remembered memes he saw on X or Truth?
IMO, it should behoove a leader to care to make the best case for their argument, and that includes understanding and optimizing for the biases in the medium through which the argument is presented. If Trump knows he is going to be mercilessly fact-checked, it's on him to make life tougher not easier for the fact-checkers. He makes valid arguments sound like lies because he doesn't bother to make them sound as true as possible, and that's unforgiveable.
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Too bad for Trump virtually nobody does that, and most avenues silo you away from trying to. You have the official spin teams like NYT and Snopes somehow leaving you believing a lie while still only telling the technical truth themselves. Then all the actual independents who did their own research get siloed into a "misinformation" or "conspiracy theorist" bucket. And then, if you manage to break through all those barriers, if you try to share what you learned with anyone, they've been so conditioned they'll still act like you are the weirdo for putting that much effort in or caring so much, and discard what you say.
In some ways, that's the beauty of it. It only has to work once per person. A person who has seen the media gestalt lie its ass off once willl probably develop amnesia and remain a goodthinker. Eventually though, the statement "the media lies its ass off" will lodge in their memeplex like a grain of sand.
And, like a grain of sand it will grow into a pearl that takes up increasingly large amounts of space whenever the topic rears its head
Even this works to Trump's advantage. I'm sure you've seen all the pearl-clutching opinion pieces about how conspiratorial thinking is destroying democracy. It's all the same pipeline. After a certain point, realizing that the media can and will bullshit you means that there's no going back to those outlets. The only way is forward, even if forward sends you to (or through) crazy town.
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I've already heard two independent reports that some person watching the debate heard the claim about eating cats and dogs and Googled it, thus finding out that there is some controversy over Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio and the disappearance of house pets. At that point, they aren't thinking "Trump lied to me!" they're thinking about the crazy story they hadn't heard of yet.
It does happen. Whether it makes a difference? I don't know.
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