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.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks with U.S. President Donald Trump during a Cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House on May 27, 2026 in Washington, D.C. Trump met with his Cabinet days after saying a peace deal with Iran was“ largely negotiated” amid expectations around the re-opening the Strait of Hormuz.
The worst deal in the history of deals
As a former Republican, sometimes it’s fun to look back on the things we — I was part of a “we” at one time — criticized Democrats for, and not all that long ago.
Remember, if you will, when Republicans condemned former President Bill Clinton for pardoning his brother and his corrupt donor friend Marc Rich?
Or, remember when Republicans wagged their fingers at former President Barack Obama’s golf outings? Or his executive orders? Or his Syrian “red line”?
Or all the times Republicans went after former President Joe Biden’s gaffes?
While those criticisms may have been justified at the time, they look patently ridiculous next to our current president’s cartoonish and downright dangerous offenses.
Offenses like pardoning Jan. 6 insurrectionists — nearly 100 of whom have gone on to be arrested for, charged with, or convicted of crimes separate from the events of that day.
Or wreaking havoc on the global economy by instituting reckless tariffs on friends, neighbors, and enemies alike?
Or taking a proverbial sledge hammer to countless government agencies that have put every American in danger, whether on airplanes, in hospitals, at job sites, or in natural disasters.
That’s just a few, but nothing looks worse next to his predecessors than Donald Trump’s supposed Iran deal, at least as it’s outlined in the Memorandum of Understanding, the details of which Trump was loath to share.
And for good reason — they are shockingly bad and humiliating for the U.S.
I remember Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA from 2015 very well. I, along with many Republicans as well as a cadre of foreign policy experts, criticized that deal for its obvious and problematic concessions to a very bad actor who we’ve long known could not be trusted. But trust was what we gave the Iranian regime, as well as sudden access to a boatload of cash — $100 billion, to be exact.
All of Obama’s provisions were temporary, which would allow Iran to restart enriching uranium upon their sunset; the deal didn’t address Iran’s ballistic missiles, or its funding of terrorist proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas; the supposed “anytime, anywhere” inspections came with a 24-day delay, if Iran so chose, giving them ample time to hide any suspect materials; and it didn’t require any congressional authority.
In short, I’d argue it wasn’t a great deal. But as bad as it was, it looks like the Magna Carta next to Trump’s.
Trump’s deal would give Iran immediate sanction relief and access to $300 billion, presumably to use to fund terror proxies; it doesn’t secure any upfront limits on uranium enrichment or missile development; it allows Iran to charge for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz in the future; and it calls for Israel to stop its attacks on Hezbollah, another win for Iran.
Neither Americans nor the Middle East are safer than we were 100-plus days ago when Trump decided to pursue this folly. And in fact, our economy is weaker for it. But Iran is unquestionably stronger and more emboldened.
They’ve seen Trump’s weakness, unseriousness, and frighteningly limited appreciation for history. They’ve seen him retreat on most of his core threats to the regime, from bombing their cultural sites to ending a civilization overnight. And they’ve taken notice as he’s abandoned the promises that were supposedly central to his justification for war in the first place — regime change, liberating the Iranian people, and removing Iran’s nuclear materials.
What a waste of blood and treasure, not to mention American might and power, only so that our enemies can watch us limp desperately toward a conclusion that’s being described — by the right — as “unthinkable,” “appeasement,” and “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.