As has been well-documented, President Donald Trump has a pathological tendency to distort the truth. However, according to a new NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll, his tendency to lie isn't tarnishing his public image — at least among Republicans polled.
According to the NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll, 76 percent of Republicans believe Trump tells the truth “most of the time.” Twenty-two percent of Republicans surveyed cited they believe he tells the truth “only some of the time or less.” Fifty-six percent of them still approve of his work as president.
On the left end of the spectrum, 94 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaners—and 76 percent of independents polled—cited they believe Trump tells the truth “only some of the time or even less frequently.”
The survey was conducted between April 20 and 27, 2018, and had a sample size of 10,163 adults.
Overall, 61 percent of Americans polled believe Trump regularly has difficulties telling the truth, yet 45 percent still approve of his job as president.
In a separate survey, the USA TODAY Trump Voter Panel—which is “a free-floating focus group” of 25 people across the country — found that a majority of them believe Trump had an affair with Stephanie Clifford (whose stage name is Stormy Daniels), despite the White House’s denials, but they do not care. Six of the seven women on the panel thought “Trump stepped out on his wife,” but excused it as typical behavior of someone with Trump’s wealth and power.
“That’s what powerful men do,” Deidra Brady told USA TODAY.
“This is typical behavior of a lot of men in powerful positions,” Margie Chandler said.
“I hate to say this, but it’s a male thing,” Patricia Shomion added “I think he’s mostly lying to himself, that he can’t bring himself out to say, ‘Well, I did, but it’s gone.’”
“We know he's no angel, and he didn't become a multi-billionaire because he's a nice guy,” John Moon, one of the men in the focus group, said. “I got over the shock of presidential affairs after Kennedy and Clinton.”
Yet Trump has become a beacon of what some call a post-truth world, a situation that is seemingly dangerous for the state of America’s democracy—as the former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright discussed in an April interview with NPR’s Terry Gross.
“What are your concerns when the President tweets or says something that isn’t just not true, but a lot of people hear or read him won’t know that?” Gross asked Albright.
“I have to say on the whole issue of DACA he has so many things wrong that I wonder whether he’s deliberately lying or whether he really doesn’t understand the issue,” Albright said. “And I know I'm very worried about the fact that there are deliberate ways of misstating the issue, and then the people think, ‘If the president said it, it must be right,’ when it's just a deliberate untruth.”
As Salon writer Lucian K. Truscott IV has written, Trump’s tendency to lie predates his presidency.
“Trump has been lying for his entire life,” Truscott wrote. “He doubtlessly learned to lie early in life from his parents and then employed lying as a real estate developer in New York City. Over the years, Trump lied in every conceivable way you can think of. He lied about the number of floors in Trump Tower. He lied that he was going to build projects he never intended to build. He lied about the number of condos he sold in his buildings. He lied about the prices he got for those condos.”
Perhaps the most disconcerting fact of the poll is that a majority of Republicans polled don’t believe Trump is lying at all though. As the American partisan divide widens, it is these lies that have been — and will be — the uniting factor among Republicans.
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