Campaign Action
When you're dealing with a politician who has proven to be a habitual and shameless liar, there are two approaches to take. You could shun him, which would be both the moral and the patriotic thing to do; there is no legitimate form of either patriotism or decency that can tolerate rank dishonesty. If you were on the shameless side of things yourself, however, you might instead choose to ignore those lies and propaganda attempts, sliding them off to the side so that you can work with the liar for your own agenda's benefit or for that of your party; see Paul Ryan for a demonstration of this particular strain of sullen malevolence.
The one approach that you really should never take, no matter how craven you are or how devoutly you have devoted yourself to Party over Country, is to embrace the liar and his lies, praise the liar and his lies, and preach to the nation that they would do well to learn from the liar and his lies.
After praising the President on the House floor for things like his “stamina,” and “conviction,” Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) criticized the press for, in his view, skipping over the Trump's positive attributes.
“No, the national liberal media won’t print that or air it or post it,” Smith said. “Better to get your news directly from the President. In fact, it might be the only way to get the unvarnished truth.”
If you were to get the "unvarnished truth" from Donald Trump, a man ever-willing to tell you of his own positive attributes and the various conspiracies arrayed against him intended to sully news of those attributes, you would be under the impression that his inaugural event was the most-attended event ever—but that most of the participants were invisible. You would believe that "three to five million" "illegal" votes had been cast against him in the last election—despite nobody, anywhere, providing any justification whatsoever for the claim. You would believe Americans in New Jersey celebrated the devastation of 9/11 on their rooftops, and that the last president was not a true American, and that Donald Trump can determine the guilt or innocence of individual criminals regardless of any evidence presented in any other American venue, and that he believes in certain policies and also the precise opposite of those policies, and that he is the fittest, most stamina-filled, smartest, most capable man that ever held office despite looking like an undercooked lump of bread dough and sounding like a man who has had nine-tenths of his adult vocabulary stolen from him at gunpoint.
What Rep. Lamar Smith, Texas Republican, is proposing is contrary to democracy. It supposes that the pronouncements of Dear Leader are worth more than the truth about Dear Leader presented by objective sources. It theorizes that the president could not, for example, be crooked, because the president would presumably mention it if it was. It is an endorsement of propaganda; it is anti-American; it is a call to embrace the lies because the lies will take Rep. Lamar Smith farther than the truth ever could. And we know all of this because Rep. Lamar Smith would never say such a thing about a president who was not a member of his own party, and would be standing on the same House floor giving a bitter and angry speech if anyone proposed the same about a man who Lamar Smith objected to.
The problem we have is not that Donald Trump is a liar. The problem we have is that one of our two parties is damn keen to embrace anything the liar says, and promote it, and demand it be given credence and attention—so long as it nets them a little bit more power than it had last week. Rep. Lamar Smith is that sort of man. He has been that sort of man for a long time now.