1. 1. @RudyGiuliani was savaged righteously over the weekend for saying, “Truth isn’t truth.” The president’s attorney explained to NBC’s @chucktodd that his client would be subject to a “perjury trap” if interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
2. To be clear, there is no such thing as a “perjury trap” for honest people. As the Post’s @ThePlumLineGS points out with necessary frequency, Trump’s problem is not that he’ll be tricked into saying something he shouldn’t to federal investigators. washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-lin…
3. His problem is that he can’t lie and he can’t tell the truth. Giuliani wants us to see a trap in Mueller’s probe, but the trap is very much of the president’s own making.
4. The more interesting question, for me, is why the reaction to “truth isn’t truth” was so savage. Though right and proper, it was over the top.
5. I mean, it’s not like “truth isn’t truth” changed anything. Giuliani has said daft things before. He’ll say daft things again. Meanwhile, the Mueller probe will plod onward in pursuit of justice.
6. I think the reason is twofold. One, we are amid a crisis in journalism. The news business is experiencing enormous technological change while under assault by a president calling reporters “the enemy of the people.”
7. This combo is going to make some of us sensitive to the president’s lawyer alleging that “truth isn’t truth.”
8. But I think there’s another reason, one that’s more personal.
9. Americans understand and, to a certain degree, accept that all presidents lie. But no one alive today has experienced so much falsehood coming straight from the heart of power in the United States.
10. For that reason alone, I’d say the savage reaction to Giuliani reflects a nation injured every day by the president’s fire hose of mendacity.
11. Injured? Yes, injured. This is boilerplate among moral philosophers. Human relations, the thinking goes, are impossible without assuming that people are generally reliable and trustworthy.
12. If they are generally unreliable and untrustworthy, anything worth doing is no longer worth it, because it’s based on fictions, fantasies, and lies.
13. Immanuel Kant said that “without truth, social intercourse and conversation become valueless,” and that “a lie always harms another; if not some particular man, then it harms mankind generally.”
14. Michel Montaigne had this to say: “Our intercourse being carried on solely by means of the word, he who falsifies that is a traitor to society.”
15. These are moral claims, but the injury can be political. When it comes to a president’s role in a democratic republic, lying is about more than the different between truth and falsehood. It’s about the trust placed in him or her to govern in the people’s name.
16. Without trust, there is no legitimacy. Without legitimacy, only tyranny remains.
17. I don’t know if tyranny was on Harry Frankfurt’s mind when he wrote On Truth, but it seems so. “The most irreducibly bad thing about lies is that they contrive to interfere with, and to impair, our natural effort to apprehend the real state of affairs,” he wrote.
18. Frankfurt: They are designed to prevent us from being in touch with what is really going on. In telling his lie, the liar tries to mislead us into believing that the facts are other than they actually are. He tries to *impose his will on us* (my stress).
19. On Truth was written in 2006 (a sequel to 2005’s best-selling On Bullshit), but it predicts the electorate’s reaction to a president who has lied more than 4,200 times is more than 500 days in office. The sheer volume does more than exhaust our critical thinking.
20. As Frankfurt presciently wrote: “Lies are designed to damage our grasp of reality. So they are intended, in a very real sense, to *make us crazy*” (my stress).
21. Sanity was not central to the reasoning behind the impeachment of Richard Nixon but injury certainly was. After enumerating six charges against Nixon, the first article of impeachment ends by citing the “manifest injury of the people of the United States.”
22. First article: "In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States,"
23. Richard Nixon quit before the American people had their final say. Time will tell if the same fate awaits Donald Trump. But if the savage reaction to Giuliani’s “truth isn’t truth” is any indication, I’d say Americans are tiring of this president’s bullshit.
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