Donald Trump has been described in any number of ways, some of them indicating incompetence, and some, evil genius. And while it’s not actually fair to try to claim both things at once, with a man like Trump, it’s actually possible.

You see, he IS most certainly incompetent. But he is a master of masking it as strength.

You’ve often heard the phrase “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.” This is what Donald Trump bases his entire life’s philosophy on, regarding facts as things that can either be ignored or restated in a way that favors his point of view.

That’s not news, and that’s the problem.

Trump lies so much — being the first president to ever have a major news outlet keep a running tally during their time in office — that we have come to accept it as par for the course. His rallies are non-stop lie fests, and he tells the lies with such panache that we skip right past them and get straight to whatever it is he’s outraged about.

For my part, I think this is the wrong order in which to report on Trump.

The media should focus first on the lies he’s currently telling in any given speech or tirade on social media or comment to a reporter, then follow that up with a retelling of how many times he’s told that lie. Then they can move on to evaluating whether the thing he’s complaining about is real. If he sets up the premise for his outrage with a lie, the outrage itself is likely to be based on disinformation as well.

That brings us to the middle point of analyzing anything Trump’s said: The point at which we determine whether it’s MIS-information or DIS-information. The difference between the two is the dividing line between incompetent and evil genius. Misinformation is a thing you get, and disinformation is a thing you give. If a president is handed a news item that’s incorrect, he’s gotten misinformation. If he’s told it’s wrong and he repeats it, he’s doling out disinformation.

To be sure, there are plenty of times that Trump just starts with the disinformation. That is, the first time he says a thing, he knows in advance that it is incorrect.

Recently, he told a rally crowd that in six states in America, it is legal to abort a baby after it is born. There’s no reason to even get into the abortion debate about viability, or when human life begins, or any of that, because that’s just a straight-up lie. It is not legal in any state to commit infanticide, nor has it ever been.

This isn’t even a “grain of truth” lie, this is an outright lie that he knows is false.

So we’ve established the lie; now, how many times has he told it? Well, in the case of the post-birth abortion lie, it goes back months at least. The rally was last month, he said it in July, he said it during his debate with Joe Biden in June, and peppered it into every conversation in between if the topic was abortion. He is lying, on purpose, over and over, in order to create his own reality, and the author of the quote above, Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, is proved correct in the case of Trump’s voters: A lie told often enough becomes the truth for them.

Trump voters now believe that not only is post-birth abortion legal, but that you can find it in six states, all run by Democrats. A three-fer lie.

There are of course innumerable examples, and just a short litany from his last news conference alone should be enough to establish that Trump is not just still lying, but doing it worse and more than ever:

• He says the economy is worse than ever, saying it’s in “the most dangerous position it’s ever been in from an economic standpoint.” But the American economy has come back from the pandemic (over which he mostly presided, and certainly the worst of it) faster than almost any country in the world. And despite recent slowing, the GDP has still grown at a faster rate in the months leading up to this news conference than in 3 of the 4 years he served as president.
• He says that Kamala Harris is a radical leftist who picked a radical leftist as a running mate. Not only is Kamala still criticized by many progressives for her hard stance on criminal justice while she was in California and for her unchanging stance on the ongoing Palestinian crisis, but everything that passed under Tim Walz during his time as Governor of Minnesota has has majority support from both the people of his own state and the rest of the nation, if those things were on a federal ballot: Free school lunches, reproductive rights, legal marijuana… Hardly radical.
• “You saw the other day with the stock market crashing. That was just the beginning. That was just the beginning.” Yes, the beginning of the stock market remaining at record levels far above it ever was while he was in office. The Dow jumped 683 points literally the day he said this. The stock market never “crashed” — it is volatile and subject to the heavy effects of speculation, and yet it has outperformed the rates during the entire time Trump was president.
• “Of course there’ll be a peaceful transfer. And there was last time.” No. No, there wasn’t.

These are just things he said a little over three weeks ago in a single news conference. They represent one-fortieth of the lies he told that day, as reckoned by fact-checkers after the event.

The problem, dear reader, is that today Trump will lie more, and more again tomorrow, and he did every one of the 26 days in between that news conference and the writing of this article. His voters treat it as normal of course, or even deny that these things are lies, despite audio, video, and historical evidence to the contrary.

But the media treats it as normal as well.

Everything that Donald Trump says should be colored in advance by the indisputable knowledge that he is a pathological liar. It would be easier to enumerate the TRUE things he’s said than to try to count his lies. So how do we solve this?

We have to start by remembering. I don’t mean “hold on to each thing as though it’s the worst thing he’s ever done.” I just mean, remember that he’s a liar not just in substance, but in style.

So to underline that point, let’s revisit a funny lie he told, for no good reason, and look at the evolution of that lie, and ask ourselves why we didn’t collectively forget about it, we just decided it didn’t matter. Because it matters.

This week was the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Dorian, and therefore of Sharpiegate™.

All I had to do was say the word, and you remembered exactly what I was talking about. Now, I’ll start by saying that it probably doesn’t help that we as a society have somehow agreed to put “-gate” at the end of every scandal. It’s automatically cheapened a bit right out of the, um, well, gate, as it were. I don’t know how we went from Watergate, one of the biggest and most illegal political scandals ever in this country to Sharpiegate, a hilarious look into the brain  of a man no one should take seriously, but here we are.

After the release of a single projection model (of nearly a dozen) on the earliest forecast the National Weather Service did for Dorian’s path, one-tenth of one county in the most extremely southeast portion of Alabama was shown getting wind gusts.

That forecast was outdated by the time they could even get it to press.

However, Trump insisted that Alabama was in the path of the hurricane and tweeted about it, causing the state of Alabama to immediately send out a tweet of their own so that Alabamians didn’t panic (and see a run on supplies, gas, water, etc.) that said no, the hurricane will never hit Alabama, you are 100% safe.

Trump insisted that it was fake news that Alabama had always been safe, because if it had always been safe, then he was wrong about something. Trump hates being wrong.

A day later, when that already-inaccurate forecast model was even MORE outdated and incorrect, Trump held up a map of the hurricane’s path that was blown up from the National Hurricane Center’s official forecast, only he or someone else had taken a black Sharpie™ (it was him; he loves those pens and SIGNS HIS NAME with them, like a sociopath) and drawn a big extending circle into Alabama, making it look like the hurricane was going to hit the state.

When everyone called him out on THAT absolutely insane turn of events, he lashed out AGAIN on Twitter.

But the fact that Trump lied in order to save face isn’t why anyone continued to cover the ridiculous story.

The important takeaway was instead this: His obsession with the Alabama thing was AT THE EXCLUSION of all else. It was DAYS after he was proven wrong about that forecast, and really, he didn’t even have to admit he was wrong to come out on top, because he’d already inculcated in his base the sense that everything on a news channel should be questioned, even the weather.

All he had to do to save face at that point was stop talking about it entirely.

But he wouldn’t. It was too important to him to be right about this thing from days ago that there was literally NO WAY for him to be right about. He just kept talking about it, EVEN AS THE ACTUAL HURRICANE PATH TOOK SHAPE. People were dead or displaced before he noticed, because he needed so badly to be perceived as correct about this one thing.

It’s like he was pushing a race car across the finish line of a rally that ended 3 days before so he could say I WIN and hope his followers believed him.

The problem is, they did. And they did so because we didn’t collectively decide to treat it as the hilariously stupid thing that it was, and say how stupid it was directly to his face. We instead put a “-gate” on the end of it, and pretended like it was a real news story for a few days, ignoring that it involved a very real hurricane (the deadliest in the history of the world, at least for the Bahamas) that Trump needed to be right about or his widdle feelings would be hurt.

That’s worrying for the state of American media, and it happened 5 years ago, and was one of the smallest lies he’s told. We have absolutely just accepted that Donald Trump is a liar and included that in our mental budget, like letting a flat-earther on stage during a debate about the future of space.

I’m terrified that we’re going to just barely make it through the Trump years — he will be too old to be a factor, eventually — and then, because stupid sells, we’ll slap a “-gate” on the end of it and include it as a funny aside in history books.

But we’re getting hit by Trumpgate right NOW. We have been for years.