Sarat is a ssociate provost, associate dean of the faculty and a professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
This month's revelations about how President Trump downplayed the coronavirus pandemic to journalist Bob Woodward seemed to foretell a political earthquake. Commentators and pundits argued that even for someone who lies as regularly as the president, his duplicity concerning Covid-19 was in a different and much more damaging category — with some calling it"disastrous."
Yet the earthquake has not materialized and the disaster for Trump seems to have been averted.
The Rasmussen Reports daily tracking poll of the president's approval ratings found that in the days after Sept. 8 — when news first broke about what Trump told Woodward for his new book, "Rage" — the number dipped slightly but quickly recovered. It actually improved a bit in the first two weeks of the month, from 47 percent to 51 percent. And a FiveThirtyEight polling analysis also indicates that, despite the commentariat's outrage, Trump has not paid a political price for his duplicity or its dramatic cost in American lives.
What explains this relative indifference to the revelations? And what does that indifference tell us about the state of our democracy?
Part of the explanation is specific to the Trump presidency, but part has to do with what Americans generally expect of their political leaders.
Deception and dishonesty were part of the Trump brand long before he entered politics. And since he became president Trump has succeeded in numbing the public to them.
A Quinnipiac poll in May found that 62 percent of the public did not think the president is honest. That number has not been below 52 percent since Trump took office. As Mark Mellman, a Democratic political operative puts it, "People have concluded that he's a liar. He lies every day. People know it."
It is no different when it comes to the pandemic. In July, 64 percent of the respondents to an ABC/Washington Post poll said they did not trust anything the president said about the pandemic.
Learning the president lied about the coronavirus has as much impact on many citizens as would the proverbial "dog bites man" story.
Indeed, his dishonesty is part of what some of his supporters like about him.
Trump understands that they take pleasure in his flaunting of conventional norms like honesty and truthfulness. That is why he lies so openly and brazenly.
But some explanation for why the Woodward story didn't move the needle has to do less with Trump than with Americans' general beliefs and expectations about lying in everyday life and in politics.
Research suggests that while people may praise truth-telling in the abstract, their behavior tells a different story. A 1996 study of college students found they told around two lies a day. While members of the community in which their school was located told fewer falsehoods, they nonetheless confessed to telling a lie in one of every five interactions with someone else. And a national study in 2010 concluded Americans tell an average 1.7 lies daily.
Americans lie and expect to be lied to by others. Living with deception and falsehood is just a fact of life. Some lies that we live with seem trivial, hardly worthy of note. But some are not so easily dismissed. They make a difference in business, commerce and personal relationships.
In our daily lives we reject the philosopher Immanuel Kant's injunction that lying is always morally wrong, and we appear to disregard the Biblical commandment to tell the truth. By and large, we do not regard honesty or truth telling as virtues in themselves.
Americans take a pragmatic view of lying and use it for what they regard as good causes.
What is true in private life is also true when it comes to what we expect from politicians. While surveys suggest most Americans view it as essential for people in public life to be honest and ethical, they do not believe politicians live up to that standard.
So, politics and dishonesty go together in the public mind. As a result, while Americans recognize that Trump is dishonest, they don't think he's much worse than other politicians.
Indeed, it seems Americans have a worldly, not Sunday school, view of truth and lying in politics. They recognize, as political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote, that "truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings."
Arendt understood that democracy does not depend on a world of truth. It can survive lying and liars. The test of any deception must be whether citizens, after the fact, would consider themselves better off as a result of it.
"In politics, hypocrisy and doublespeak are tools," Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution declared a few years ago. "They can be used nefariously, illegally or for personal gain, as when President Richard Nixon denied Watergate complicity, but they can also be used for legitimate public purposes, such as trying to prevent a civil war, as in Lincoln's case, or trying to protect American prestige and security, as when President Dwight D. Eisenhower denied that the Soviet Union had shot down a United States spy plane."
One has to ask whether Trump's lies, which appear to have the sole purpose of benefiting himself, can be equated with those by Lincoln or Eisenhower. And one has to wonder whether his habitual lying and endless dishonesty has potentially a far more corrosive effect than his predecessors' deceptions in times of national crisis.
Democracy cannot survive and prosper if our political leaders deny that there are things that are true and things that are false — or assert that the difference between truth and falsity does not matter at all. It is endangered if leaders lie to citizens without guilt or shame.
The threat Trump poses to our democracy is not just that he tells lies, even when they are as consequential as those he told about the severity of the coronavirus, but that he lies in ways that undermine the foundations of democracy itself.
Americans across the political spectrum have continued to ask about the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s connections among the political elite. (Angela Weiss/AFP)
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks to voters at a town hall at the Elks Lodge 188 on June 7, 2026, in Portland, Maine.
McConnell and Platner both feel entitled
The two men could not be more different. One, a Republican, octogenarian, seven-term Southern senator, the other a progressive, millennial Maine oysterman who’s never spent a day in elected office.
But Mitch McConnell, the senior senator from Kentucky who’s been MIA for the past few weeks and Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who’s facing calls to drop out of his race against Sen. Susan Collins, apparently do have something in common: an outsized sense of entitlement.
McConnell, who is 84 and not running for reelection, has been hospitalized for three weeks, and yet we still don’t fully know what he was admitted for or what his condition is. Per CNN, “his office has not disclosed a medical reason for the hospitalization or provided specifics on his health status beyond saying last week that he ‘continues to improve’ and ‘is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters.’ ”
While several legislators have said they’ve talked to him and insist he sounds strong, others have said they are completely in the dark. One MAGA influencer, Laura Loomer, posted ”High level source close to the White House tells me ‘Mitch McConnell is officially brain dead. He’s not coming back.’ ”
Meanwhile, up in Maine, Platner has been artfully dodging calls from his own party to drop out of his race after several allegations of misconduct from women, including a sexual assault allegation from a former girlfriend, came to light. While Platner, who has managed to survive a Nazi-tattoo scandal, a sexting scandal, and several old tweets scandals, denies the allegations, he has not quit.
High-profile Democrats including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, the latter of whom had unsuccessfully hand-selected Maine Gov. Janet Mills to face Collins instead of Platner, have urged Platner to drop out, while other Dems have accused him of trying to influence the picking of his replacement.
Maine Democratic Party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson released a statement Tuesday, which said in part:
“Unfortunately, Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like. We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate nor in determining what this process looks like.”
Both incidents show a deep lack of accountability to voters, who in one case deserve to know whether their senator is capable of performing his duties, and in another deserve a candidate who isn’t being accused of crimes, bigotry and deception.
The offensive and odious entitlement of both McConnell and Platner stands out not because it is particularly unique among today’s political class. Tom Kean, the New Jersey GOP congressman, missed more than 100 votes, only sharing after a three-month mystery absence that he was dealing with depression.
Former President Joe Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin failed to disclose a hospitalization for prostate cancer surgery, flouting the established rules for Cabinet members and senior U.S. officials.
From Biden’s insistence on running for reelection despite his obvious cognitive and political weaknesses to Trump’s brazen flouting of laws and norms, few politicians seem to appreciate that their public service job comes with responsibilities to constituents, including transparency and honesty.
But both parties increasingly justify the chicanery, because the stakes of winning elections and keeping power are simply too high. But that’s no excuse. If we’ve learned anything over the past decade, it’s that character and accountability do, in fact, matter. And when we, the voters, stop caring about it, well, so do they.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.