What you need to knowPresident Trump has lied more in his first 100 days than any other president.
Why this is not normalIn “The Art of the Deal,” Donald Trump’s ghostwriter coined the term “truthful hyperbole.” The book said, “People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular … It’s an innocent form of exaggeration – and it’s a very effective form of promotion.”
Except truthful hyperbole is lying and Trump has been tallied with telling 488 false or misleading claims in his first 100 days, according to fact checkers for the Washington Post.
The problem with a president lying 4.8 times a day and usually repeating the same lies over and over is that people have a tendency to believe a lie that has been repeated to them. It is called “illusory truth” and the idea was coined in the 1970s. The more Trump repeats that the New York Times is failing, the more people believe it. The more that he repeats that immigrants are marring the U.S. economy, the more people believe him.
Illusory truth causes cognitive overload. Our brains can only handle sifting through so many false statements at one time. When faced with a constant stream of falsehoods, an overburdened brain stops sifting through falsehoods and absorbs them instead.
Trump has built his life on overburdening people’s ability to sort through his BS and that’s his strategy for the presidency, too.
Patty TempletonDGO Staff Writer
