The truth about lies

This WaPo article has online tongues wagging about why the Washington Post says things like "falsely claims" and "misstatements" in reference to some things that Trump has said. The things he says are lies, the argument goes, and saying anything else is going easy on The Donald.

The truth of the matter is that things are not that simple. And here's a story to illustrate the problem.

In the run-up to the Iraq War, Dubya stated that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, as an argument for invading the country. At the same time, Saddam Hussein made public statements that Iraq did not, in fact, have WMDs. What was true, and who was lying?

First, as we all know, Iraq did not have WMDs. But does that mean Hussein was not a liar, and Bush was? To answer these two seemingly obvious questions, let's delve into the difference between misstatements and lies.

A misstatement means nothing more than that the thing someone says is false. By that measure, it was Hussein who made a misstatement. But was it also a lie?

A lie is a statement that the speaker believes to be false, but that the speaker pretends is true. A lie is a very basic act of deception, an outward denial of an inward belief. However, what you say does not need to be false for it to be a lie. That is, not every lie is a misstatement.

Here's an example: imagine you're at work, while your spouse is at home. A friend calls you to invite you and your spouse to their birthday party, but you don't feel like going. So you invent an excuse and say, "I'm afraid we can't make it; my spouse has COVID." You hang up, and your spouse calls you to say they have COVID. In this case, what you said was true (you did not make a misstatement), but because you didn't know it was true, you were still lying.

Similarly, in our story, it's possible that Hussein was lying, but still telling the truth. The reasoning is as follows: he asked his nuclear scientists how things were going with his WMD program. Because he was a brutal dictator, those scientists were afraid to tell him the truth, and instead told him it was going great, and that they had a stockpile ready to go. As a result, Hussein falsely believed that he had WMDs, which means that his statement was a lie (even though it was true).

Now here's the cherry on the cake: there's a good chance that this entire story is itself a lie. The Americans, always eager to portray Hussein in the worst light possible, may have concocted this story to make him out to be a liar.

And what about Bush? Did he tell a lie when he claimed Iraq had WMDs? That's a difficult question to answer. You'd need to know if Bush actually believed what some people were telling him, or if he disbelieved it and said it anyway. And to know that, you'd need to be able to read Bush's mind, or access things he said or wrote down in private that would clarify that he was, in fact, lying.

Coming back to Trump, there's overwhelming evidence that Trump is an inveterate liar. There are countless cases of Trump not just making misstatements, but also telling outright lies. The perfect example of this is him losing the election. You could argue that in the first few days after the elections, Trump genuinely believed he hadn't lost. But his persistence in that belief, despite everyone around him saying the opposite, and his repeated, pigheaded and illegitimate attempts to make it true, prove it to be a lie.

However, it doesn't follow that anything that comes out of Trump's mouth is a lie, even if what he says is demonstrably false. The crucial fact is not the truth of falsehood of what he says, but his belief as to the truth or falsehood. I suspect that this is why WaPo is very cautious in calling Trump a liar.