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Flashback - 46 years ago

joker44

In the wind

"But I wonder whether the enormity of his lying has sunk in yet – whether we have, or can, come to terms with the thought that so much of what he said to us was just noise, words, and that we can no longer begin by accepting any of it as the truth.   This is a total reversal of the way we were brought up to think about presidents, a departure from deeply ingrained habits. One's mind resists the thought that our president is a faithless man, capable of looking at us in utter sincerity from the other side of the television camera and telling us multiple, explicit, barefaced lies."

No, this isn't some contemporary journalist writing about Trump. It's an excerpt from Elizabeth Drew's Washington Journal, an account of Watergate and the fall of Richard Nixon.

Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark had this comment:
This feels like a missive from a kinder, more naive age. Back in 1974, you could still be shocked by presidential lying. But for us, it has become a way of life so normal that its seems like a constant background noise. Our minds no longer resist the thought that "our president is a faithless man," because that's been drilled into us thousands of times over the last four years. 

I think it's fair to add that to a lesser extent it extends thru the W Bush and Clinton presidencies. They lied but much less frequently than Trump.