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Good thread putting the president's non-stop lying in the appropriate political and moral frame. It's not a personality quirk, it's an essential dimension of the norm-busting threat he poses to our constitutional system.
Here's something I wrote last August where I tried to nail down the nature and significance of Trump's lying, bullying M.O. Everyone, even his supporters, know he's more than willing to burn the whole thing down to save himself. medium.com/@sethcotlar/wh…
This is why I think Nixon is still the most apt historical referent for this presidency. Nixon was willing to do all kinds of crazy sh*t to stay in power, the difference was there were people around him and Republicans in positions of power with the courage to say "enough."
In my experience, many boomers (and even Gen Xers too) drew an understandable but ultimately only partially correct lesson from Watergate--that all politicians are crooks and all institutions are corrupt.
Listening to @maddow's amazing Bagman podcast about Spiro Agnew, however, convinced me that we could also legitimately re-narrate Watergate as a success story--the press and the justice system worked!
Our political culture would be healthier if, when we talked about Watergate, we spent less time talking about Nixon and the crooks and more time talking about Elliot Richardson and George Beall.
