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Okay but if an average politician makes a specific claim, I can at least assess whether I find that claim persuasive. When they quote a figure at me, or speak about some specific action that was taken, I can easily cross-reference that information to discover the context of what’s being discussed; normal politicians rarely just make up figures, or say things happened when in fact they didn’t happen at all. They might not be giving me the whole story, but I can generally be confident that they’re not telling me a made-up story. At worst they are omitting important context and/or alternate interpretations of the facts they’re discussing. They’re not just making up names, dates, events, etc.
Trump, in contrast, sometimes speaks in such an elliptical and non-specific way that it can be impossible to determine what specific event he’s referring to, or what specific claim he’s actually making. The details he brings up might be half-remembered, or mistaken, or he might be conflating two different things. This is tolerable if it’s some personal anecdote, but if he’s discussing an important matter of political fact, it’s actually really important for him to get all the details right, so that his constituents know what he’s actually talking about. I would rather a politician tell me something true but incomplete/misleading, rather than tell me something false but directionally correct.
This strikes me as incredibly strange for anyone to believe.
What the 'Trump lies like a used car salesman, Democrats lie like lawyers' line is saying is something along the lines of this: who do you prefer, the guy who is trying to sell you a used car as new when there's bullet holes in the dash and bloodstains on the back seat? Or the guy who uses a technicality in court to screw you over? They are very different. The first graft is on you to recognize when the wool is being pulled over your eyes. The second is backed by the full force of an edifice and system of law that is impossible for any single person to challenge without prodigious resources.
When push comes to shove, I doubt that you would choose the first. If you were woken up in the middle of the night by a fire alarm, would you rather someone tell you 'it's a minor disturbance' or 'your sofa is on fire!' If politics matters at all, or if you buy that it's the continuation of war by other means, being directionally correct matters a hell of a lot more than you think it does.
What about a discussion with your boss?
"Are you guys going to fire me?"
"Uhhh nooooooooo."
vs.
"At the time of this meeting we do not plan to fire you anytime soon."
With the former I'm going to be aware and can plan accordingly, with the latter I might be fooled by any of the technicalities in that sentence or the more proficient lying.
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On the other hand, when I rely on having precise knowledge of what someone is doing, I'd prefer them to state the technical truth and nothing but the technical truth, rather than make shit up.
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How many examples of "average politicians" telling made-up stories would be required to shift your prior here? "Putin is blackmailing Trump with tapes of him being urinated on by Russian Prostitutes" and "Russia hacked election machines in 2016 to secure a Trump victory" and "The Hunter Biden laptop is a Russian disinformation campaign" are three obvious examples of made-up stories promulgated by those you seem to be classifying as "average politicians", and they were not even "directionally" correct. I am pretty sure that I could add dozens more examples from the last few years with minimal effort.
It seems to me that, moving beyond questions of aesthetics, this preference grounds out on quantifiable concrete outcomes. That is, we can actually look at population-level beliefs, and we can track those population-level beliefs to the statements of political actors that formed and broadcasted the message that gave rise to them.
This is one of my favorite graphs. It's a measure of population-level beliefs about an objective, factual question of immediate and undeniable salience to the political realities of our nation. It seems to me that the shape of this graph was directly created by the "normal politician" style of discourse which you are arguing for, and the consequences were likewise quite direct: a massive increase in violent crime nation-wide. More damningly, it seems trivial to me to demonstrate how obvious "made up stories" spun off and achieved virality directly from those "normal politician"-style claims.
What I see in that graph is an obvious example of a completely compromised epistemic environment, one where the center of gravity of the consensus narrative is completely detached from objective reality. And it seems to me that such epistemic compromise is hardly an isolated occurrence, and is in fact the norm across much of the policy space, from foreign affairs to educational policy to gun politics to abortion to the status of the federal bureaucracy and so on. If one accepts that broad epistemic corruption as a given, I'm at a loss to understand why you prefer the style that produces such woeful outcomes.
So, of these examples, I do agree that two of them - the Russiagate stuff and the Hunter laptop - were essentially made-up stories promulgated by actual politicians. The hacked voting machines thing is not, as far as I recall, something any actual elected officials claimed. (Please correct me if I’m wrong.) Look, I was incredibly radicalized by Russiagate. It was one of the major things, along with the mass delusions about BLM which you highlight later in your post (a well-chosen example particularly given your interlocutor), that turned me against the progressive media establishment. I fully agree that they were scandalous lies which should have led to imprisonments. And to be clear, Republicans are not spared - I imagine that the WMD lie in the lead-up to the Iraq War is one of the other examples you had on hand.
I will not pretend that aesthetics do not play a major part here. @nomenym is correct that the way Donald Trump speaks is highly reminiscent of the way stupid people speak, and I do not want my President to sound like a stupid person. This is a powerful and viscerally-felt pre-rational preference for me, and it certainly colors the way I have experienced the Trump phenomenon over the past 9 years.
The way that, say, Richard Nixon spoke is the way a leader would speak to intelligent and well-informed populace with the wherewithal to directly assess the veracity of his claims and draw the appropriate conclusions. When a politician makes specific and falsifiable claims, I can use my own judgment and do my own research; if I determine that what he or she said was misleading or incomplete, I can punish him or her accordingly with my vote, and I can gather more information myself in order to figure out whose claims to credit in the future. Whereas with a president who is a bullshitter, I have no way to confidently assess whether what he said was even intended to be taken seriously in the first place. His supporters may not believe in some of the outrageously false things his opponents do, but I still believe that they are on average less well-informed about the world and about how the government works, even if this still ends up cashing out with them having better object-level policy preferences.
In no way am I suggesting that Kamala Harris speaks to the public that way. She is scarcely more well-informed than the lowest common denominator member of the public to whom she’s speaking. And even as I’m enumerating the qualities I long for in a politician, I recognize how doe-eyed and naïve I must sound to someone who has already given up on the future of the American regime to the extent you have.
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"The Hunter Biden laptop is a Russian disinformation campaign" was actually "The Hunter Biden laptop has the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign". Often they are not straight up lying but saying something that is technically true but designed in a way to mislead their audience into believing something that is false. I think if you consciously do this it is not any different from lying. It's like these people running scams on Amazon where they sell you the box but not the thing inside the box but then claim its not fraud because they sent you what was in the picture.
I think that your intuition here is actually one of the biggest ethnic/cultural divideds between the median Trump voter and most of the posters here.
Trump "lies" but is he dishonest?
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Yes, and I am saying that for a lot of Trump supporters it's the other way around. They feel like the former too often ends up going in the wrong direction altogether.
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