We don't need no steenkeen truth

Presented with a short list of Trump’s most frequent falsehoods, [...] the lady who wore the New England Patriots socks at the very front of the line to get into Hertz Arena [said] she was not interested in whether or how many times Trump might lie that evening. “I don’t care if he sprouts a third dick up there,” she said.

  HuffPo

Does she think he has two?

She declined to give her name or to elaborate on her views of the president’s anatomy.

[...]

Trump has passed through the looking glass into a make-pretend world of invented facts, legions of his fans have happily followed him.

Jennifer Petito, who drove across the state from Melbourne to see Trump, was similarly dismissive of proof that Trump’s claims are false.

“I don’t believe that,” she said, joining in with the verbal assault on HuffPost for daring to challenge Trump’s version of reality. “I don’t believe he would lie like that.”

[...]

Deep down, they know that these things are false. They don’t care,” [Tom Nichols, a professor at the Naval War College] said. “What they object to is the sense of inferiority created when someone tells them that the things they know to be false are actually false.”

[...]

The Washington Post found that Trump’s more frequent speeches combined with more prevarications per speech have raised his average number of false statements per day to 30 – making these past seven weeks a veritable festival of falsehoods.

Whatever he can get away with.

Four days later and 600 miles northwest awaiting Trump’s rally at Pensacola airport, Gene Ponder, a high school government and politics teacher in Daphne, Alabama, wound up arguing that there was no real difference between having built a wall and falsely claiming to have built one.

“It’s a matter of semantics,” he said, and pointed out that falsely claiming to have built a wall was an effective campaign tool. “It’s wonderful campaigning for the Republican Party in congressional seats around the country, to stimulate the base.”

Which is essentially Trump's response if challenged. He just shrugs and says, "It got me here." He has no morals. Whatever gets him what he wants is okay. The concern here is that most of the GOP has decided to follow his lead. And that means, they'll do anything to win.

While Trump typically has been putting out many dozens of falsehoods and exaggerations per hour-long rally, HuffPost curated five with which to interview rally-goers: 1) Trump has received nearly $5 billion already to build his wall; 2) military veterans got the ability to see private doctors in the event of long waiting lists thanks to Trump; 3) his recent $716 billion military budget is the largest ever; 4) U.S. Steel is opening as many as eight new plants thanks to Trump’s tariffs; 5) and the real name of the Democratic Party is the “Democrat” Party.

All five are flatly untrue and easily disproven.

[...]

With only a short time left before the doors were opened, [Virginia Alonso, a] Cuban-American retiree was in little mood to hear about Trump’s falsehoods. She regarded the single page HuffPost had asked her to review with suspicion.

[...]

“Why should I believe you?” Alonso said. “I don’t believe you.”

Others [...] were similarly outraged by HuffPost’s list.

“He doesn’t like fake news. Why would he say things that are not true?” asked Barbara Guzman, who owns a label-making business in nearby Cape Coral. “Most of the things he says I agree with, and I believe.”

[...]

One man who would not give his name said HuffPost’s list of falsehoods was unfair because it had only five items and because it did not contain an equal number of good things Trump had done.

“This is fake news!” he shouted, repeating the line Trump regularly uses to describe reporting that does not flatter him.

Marie Brausan, who lives in the Chicago suburbs but winters in Fort Myers, said if the news media didn’t like Trump’s words, it was their own fault for criticizing him all the time rather than giving him positive feedback, as a parent does with a toddler.

“Of course I want him to be truthful and honest,” she said, but added: “The bottom line is he is not a politician, he is doing what he said he’d do, and I trust him.”

[...]

“He does what he says he’s going to do,” said a Penscola woman who would only give her first name, Diane. But after learning that Trump had not, as he has claimed, started building a wall, she said that it didn’t really matter. “No, it doesn’t bother me, because he’s going to make everything balance out in the end.”

[...]

Rick Wilson, the author of the recent “Everything Trump Touches Dies” and a longtime GOP consultant in Florida who opposed Trump from the start, said the president’s supporters are the victims of a con artist.

“Once a con man cons somebody, there is a bias among the marks not to admit that they’re that stupid,” he said. “In this particular one, they want it to go on and on. They love it.”

Nichols, also a Trump critic, said that the gulf between what supporters believed Trump would bring and what he has actually delivered is clearly causing mental anguish for them. “When you start from the assumption that they know they’re wrong, and how the immensity of the cognitive dissonance makes them deeply uncomfortable, the rest of their reactions start to make a lot more sense,” he said.

Scholar and author Sarah Kendzior has said that when she talks to people who voted for Trump, if they think she's just some random person, they'll often express their disappointment and voice complaints about him, but if they know she's a writer or a journalist, they never admit any complaint. She takes this as a good sign for distrusting the polls that show Trump approval. I hope so.

Yet even those who told HuffPost that they are troubled by his falsehoods almost always found some mitigating factor to excuse them. Hillary Clinton. Democrats generally. The Bernie Sanders supporter who opened fire at a congressional Republicans’ baseball practice. Planned Parenthood.

In Pensacola, retired Defense Department project manager Armando Hernandez shrugged off Trump’s falsehoods entirely. “Well, a lot of people believe him,” he said of Trump, and then unloaded on Democrats. “Democrats say whatever they want to say, even if it’s false. The last Democrat I voted for was Jimmy Carter and that was the worst mistake I ever made.”

Denny Elkins, a technician with the local Glass Doctor franchise, said he couldn’t explain why Trump felt compelled to lie so much but that, in the end, it wasn’t important. “I’m more comforted having him as president, even if he doesn’t tell all the truth all of the time,” he said. “It makes me ill to think that Hillary could have been president. In my opinion, you can’t trust a thing she says.”

[...]

“It doesn’t bother me. No one’s got a perfect memory,” [73-year-old Tom] Walton said of Trump’s propensity for falsehoods. “He’s got a lot on his mind.”

One 75-year-old woman who declined to give her name said she supported Trump because Obama had doubled the national debt in his two terms in office. But when it was pointed out that Trump was on track to have $1 trillion annual deficits during a strong economy, she demanded to know why the media has not covered that. She added that she watches Fox News religiously and had not seen that mentioned.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.