Yeah, presidents lying is definitely a new horrible thing. Not like "I did not have relations with that woman" coming from a philandering guy lying under oath, or "if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor" coming from a guy pushing a horrible 2000+ page debacle. Or maybe illary telling us how she landed under sniper fire, or about supposed reasons her email setup was perfectly okie dokie. The lies of the president elect are now an issue!! The sky is falling!
Trump lies more in a single month than Clinton has in her entire career, and Clinton is not terribly honest. In fact, she's terribly
dishonest. And her husband is worse. But recall that there was outrage over Clinton's lie about Lewinsky and that he was impeached over it? These days, who cares any more about a single lie when they care coming at us daily?
I didn't say this is the first time a politician has ever lied. It's the frequency of the lying, and its brazenness. By brazenness, I mean that Trump tells lies which can be debunked by any ordinary citizen with 3 minutes of time on his hands and Google. For example, the Trump campaign just said that he won by one of the biggest electoral college margins in history and called his victory a "landslide." This statement can be debunked in literally seconds. The point being that Trump will lie about absolutely anything because he
knows his supporters will believe him no matter what he says. He can claim that our entire electoral system is corrupt and that election results can never be trusted (unless Trump wins, then only the popular vote will be questioned), and people instantly believe him. What are the implications of making people believe that our elections can't be trusted?
This isn't about Trump's lying per se. It's that no one cares any more. Anything said which supports your political football team is fine and dandy. Even Russian propaganda is worth re-tweeting if it says something that hurts the other side. This isn't new but the extent of it is staggering. We're fast becoming a society where truth is totally unimportant. You know what happens when truth doesn't matter any more? Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany losing WWI and people believed him. If people can be manipulated into believing anything, we won't have a democracy for much longer.
Yeah, I'm afraid the sky IS falling, and Trump being POTUS is only the beginning of it. From now on, campaigns will rise and fall entirely on how savvy each side is in proliferating fake news on social media because nothing else really matters any more except how much online propaganda is out there because this propaganda will always be believed by credulous partisans. Always. The hacking can probably be avoided with additional security in the future but people's willingness to believe literally anything they read isn't going to change. If you aren't concerned about this, you should be. It may be happening more on the right these days than the left, but both sides are doing it and will continue to do so in the future, at an accelerating rate.