Is Donald Trump a liar? Maybe not — and that's when it really gets scary

There was and is no law requiring the children of undocumented immigrants to be taken away from their parents at the border. There is no crime wave caused by immigrants in Germany. (That nation's historically low crime rate has fallen recently, and as in the United States immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens.) There was no measurable number of illegal votes cast in the 2016 election. Donald Trump's inauguration did not draw the largest crowds in history, and in his first year he did not sign more legislation than any other president. (Indeed, he ranked last among post-World War II presidents.)

Do you want me to go on? I definitely don't. But how are we to categorize Trump as an unquenchable fount of untruth, who by the Washington Post's count passed 3,000 "false or misleading statements" as president more than a month ago? Is he a liar, a bullshitter, a gaslighter, a prevaricator, an ignoramus or a delusional sociopath whose relationship to the world of observable reality and established fact is at best "transactional"? I see two viable answers to this question:

1. It's the wrong question.
2. Yes.

The second answer is correct because Trump uses all those tactics and more, sometimes in ways that seem calculated and sometimes on what looks like pure instinct. Clear back to his first intervention in what could loosely be called politics, when he was a New York tabloid celebrity who took out full-page ads in four daily newspapers calling for the execution of the five young men accused in the "Central Park jogger case" of 1989, Trump has displayed little or no concern for the truth.

In fairness, Trump had no way of knowing that the Central Park Five, who spent years in prison for that horrific rape, would later be proven innocent. Everyone else thought they were guilty too. If their conviction was the most infamous miscarriage of justice produced by the overlapping racial panic and crime panic of that era, it certainly wasn't the only one. (A remarkable data point, one the president likely views as fake news: There were roughly 2,000 murders a year in New York City between 1988 and 1993. Last year there were 290, the lowest recorded total since 1951.)

What's far more important is that Trump didn't care whether those five young black and Latino men were guilty or innocent. The facts of the case were beside the point; their lives were beside the point. (Black lives quite literally did not matter.) Those men were no more than sinister extras in a psychodrama fueled by pure emotion — fear, rage, bitterness, confusion — in which questions of law or fact were irrelevant.

For many white New Yorkers and white Americans of Trump's generation, the Central Park rape case seemed to symbolize a moment of societal collapse, and to epitomize a racial, generational and existential threat. Their city, and their country, were being taken from them by roving bands of dark-skinned criminals: It's precisely the anarchic, hellish social vision Trump repeatedly laid out during his presidential campaign and during his "American carnage" inaugural address.

I think it's clear that the Central Park rape case -- and the climate of high crime, an uncontrolled drug epidemic and extreme racial tension that produced it — was a massively important event to Donald Trump, one that remains crucial to his understanding of the world. It's worth observing that none of those things was imaginary, and that the urban environment was far more threatening than it is now.

But while most American cities, and New York in particular, have recovered from the traumas of that period, Donald Trump has not. He often appears to believe that nothing has changed since that era, or that it revealed truths about American society that today, out of "political correctness," we avoid or ignore. His obsession with gruesome, violent crimes — with rape in particular — and his nightmarish fantasies about hordes of animalistic invaders bent on destroying America all echo the semi-mythical tabloid coverage surrounding the Central Park case.

I suspect that was also the moment when Trump clearly understood that he possessed a certain dark gift: He could tap into a deep current of popular rage and discord — at least in a certain proportion of the population — and channel it for his own purposes. The vicious attack on Trisha Meili, and the victimization of five young men who didn't do it, began the process that made Donald Trump president. Along the way, of course, he also orchestrated the cynical hunt for Barack Obama's birth certificate, endearing himself to the paranoid right. Correctly understood, I think that's a later chapter in the same narrative.

That history also provides an invaluable key that helps unlock the nature, meaning and purpose of Trump's ceaseless torrent of lies, which brings us back around to my original question about whether or not to call them lies. And to my first answer: It isn't an interesting or useful question.

Sanctimoniously declaring that the president lies all the time and that it's shocking and scandalous, although accurate, isn't going to convince anyone of anything or make good things happen. There is literally no one in the United States of America who is likely to change their minds about Donald Trump on that basis.

To some degree that's even following Trump down the troll-hole: His followers either believe that everything Trump says is true and everything the media says is fake news, or understand that he's a blowhard and bullshitter who gets the libtards' undies in a bundle and love him for it. In either case, standing there with a ledger counting up all the things he says that are false or misleading or simply not nice is playing an assigned role of schoolmarm in a drama Trump is directing.

But it's also useless to slice and dice the degrees of prevarication in a way that sort of, kind of, almost shoehorns Trump into the admittedly debased tradition of democratic discourse. (I feel like I need scare-quotes around several of those words.) I recently hosted a Salon Talks conversation with ABC News legal affairs correspondent Dan Abrams, who offered an articulate, lawyerly defense of why certain Trumpian falsehoods qualify as lies while others don't. Here's part of that exchange.

Abrams: I think it has to be on a case-by-case basis, right? It can't be every time the president says something that is not accurate, it's a lie. Because I think to say it's a lie, there has to be -- I don't want to say proof, but, you have to believe that he knows it's not true. He knows it's not true and he's saying it. In some of these cases, it's possible that people around him told him something that isn't accurate, right?

Did he believe that there was a law that required the separation of children from their parents at the border? Maybe Jeff Sessions told him that there was.

Well, yes. It is a more complex issue than people are sort of portraying it, right? As a result, on that issue, I wouldn't necessarily call it a lie. I would say that it's not true that there had to be legislation, or there had to be an executive order.

Or when he says, as he did the other day, that crime is way up in Germany and it's because of immigrants. That's two things that are false.

Right, but do we know he doesn't know that accurately? Do we know he was specifically —

You can use Google and get the statistics.

That's true. He's wrong. But does that mean he's intentionally lying about it? Or is he just winging it and doesn't know what he was talking about? I don't mean to play lawyer here, but your question suggests, and I think rightly, that words matter. Whether we're going to use the word "lie" matters. I don't think just because he says that crime is up in Germany and crime is not in up in Germany, that means he knows crime is not up in Germany. I mean, all the examples ... it seems odd. Who knows? He may be lying. But regardless, we know that he's wrong.

To be clear, I'm not accusing Abrams of any form of bad faith or cowardice. He said clearly that the administration's family-separation policy was wrong, and that numerous claims Trump has made — about crime and immigration and lots of other stuff — were false. I take his point that from a legal and moral point of view, there is clearly a distinction between deliberately false statements made by someone who understands that the truth lies elsewhere and Sh*t Our President Says Because It Feels Good.

Earlier, Abrams observed that it was appropriate to call the president's claims about the size of his inauguration crowd lies (as the New York Times did at the time), because everyone could see the news photos that made clear those claims were blatantly false. That standard, however, assumes a cognitive understanding of external reality as something independent of one's wishes, fears and fantasies. I am not at all confident that Donald Trump possesses such an understanding.

More to the point, Abrams is a lawyer and a network news journalist, which means that by default and by temperament he is loyal to the major institutions of American society, and eager to argue that they are performing more or less as designed. They produced an anomalous presidency in this case, but they can also provide an interpretive frame that helps make sense of it. I don't believe those are reliable assumptions either, and I think that parsing which of Trump's lies are lies is to ignore the more dangerous bigger picture.

In a certain sense, I suspect that Trump never lies at all, at least in the sense that Abrams means. Let's go back to my earlier example: Did he know that the Central Park Five were innocent when he called for their execution? Clearly not; no one did. What he evidently took away from that, consciously or otherwise, was the principle that what feels true is more important to human beings than what is true. People want to believe that their prejudices and preconceptions are justified, and that they are not evil or delusional for feeling as they do. Feed that, nurture it and encourage it, and they will follow you.

Did Trump know, 20-odd years later, that there was no Kenyan birth certificate for Obama, and effectively no mystery about his birthplace? No doubt he had rational people tell him that, which is why he never definitively claimed otherwise. (It was all the now-familiar Trumpian dodge: Well, I don't really know, but people are saying!) What he knew for sure was that many white people who saw themselves as left behind or downtrodden passionately longed to believe that the black president with the funny name was not really the president, and that the social and cultural changes he embodied could somehow, magically, be undone.

Long before that, Trump had absorbed a central technique of salesmanship, which is to believe what you're saying while you're saying it, no matter how preposterous it is. Whether he personally believed the birther conspiracy didn't matter, just as it doesn't matter whether he believes that Mexican rapists and gang members are pouring over the border, or that millions of illegal immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton, or that James Comey and Andrew McCabe led a secret FBI plot against him (which, in an especially devilish twist, involved discrediting his opponent at the 11th hour).

Those things feel true to many people, effectively the same people who embraced Trump's call for the summary execution of the Central Park defendants and the imposition of a police state. They seem to explain events that otherwise appear inexplicable, and reinforce a collective sense of grievance and persecution that Donald Trump clearly shares.

Does he believe those things? Are they lies? Not exactly. Trump airs out his outrageous statements and "believes" them for a while — insofar as he believes anything — as long as the adulation keeps on pouring in from his fans, who also "believe" them. Then he discards them without a moment's thought when they stop working. Heard anything about those millions of illegal voters lately?

These lies feel true to Trump and his supporters, even when the details get wobbly, because they are in service to a larger perceived truth, one that has remained consistent and coherent throughout Trump's career. It is a simple and powerful narrative, which those who oppose Trump and wish to restore democracy cannot afford to ignore: America is under assault from black and brown savages who want to destroy our culture and ravage our women; only one man, if given unlimited power, can stop them.