Donald Trump lies regularly, about everything, and doesn't care whether it's a lie or not. This is because he is a psychopath and/or a narcissist. He's not going to get better. He's not going to change. Yes, his team can ensure his daughter or son-in-law sits in on every meeting in order to calm and direct him; yes, we can all wink and nod as his press secretary spouts easily provable falsehoods in a daily effort to support the latest delusional fantasies of the guy who will fire him if he doesn't, but the press needs to get it through their thick skulls that nothing Donald Trump says can be presumed to be true, there is no supposed policy or stance that he believes in for any span longer than is necessary for him to get through the discussion he's currently in, and he does not care, at all, whether you catch him doing it.
White House aides said that Trump will have signed 32 executive orders by Friday, the most of any president in their first 100 days since World War II. That's a far cry from Trump's heated campaign rhetoric, in which he railed against his predecessor's use of executive action late in his tenure as President Barack Obama sought to maneuver around a Republican Congress. Trump argued that he, the consummate deal maker, wouldn't need to rely on the tool.
"The country wasn't based on executive orders," said Trump at a town hall in South Carolina in February 2016. "Right now, Obama goes around signing executive orders. He can't even get along with the Democrats, and he goes around signing all these executive orders. It's a basic disaster. You can't do it."
Yes, he was adamantly opposed to executive orders when it was useful to say so. Now he is bragging about sending out more than anybody else ever dared, because now having that contrary opinion is more useful—if anybody, anywhere is surprised by this outcome they should hang their heads in shame. Trump was also furious that Obama occasionally played golf, and publicly vowed during the campaign he would never do such a thing himself; since the inauguration he has travelled to his own private clubs regularly, and done precisely that. He lies, all the time, about everything. There is nothing Donald Trump said on the campaign trail that he will follow through with now unless, and only unless, he can find momentary gain from it.
It's all fine and good for the press to point these lies out—it is, after all, the entire point of having a free press—but after several hundred or so of these stories get written, day in, day out, there still seems to be a supreme reluctance to tie all the strings together and come to the obvious conclusion. This isn't "normal" political lying. This is compulsive. This is not at all normal. Having a national leader whose words cannot be taken at face value and whose policies are, as even his own staff admits, simply whichever policies will flatter the last person to have spoken to him, is incoherent and unstable and outright dangerous.
That’s not a debatable point. The presidency is not a pageant win, there are real responsibilities involved. Domestic decisions, military decisions, appointments, foreign negotiations—it's not a ceremonial position. Having a compulsive liar in the job is a big freaking deal.