Trump is much more shameless as a trafficker in untruth. He seems willing to say whatever he deems necessary to win support at the moment, and he tries to get people to accept his statements through the sheer vehemence of his rhetoric. When he says, falsely, that “there’s no real assimilation” among “second- and third-generation” Muslims in the United States, it clearly doesn’t matter to Trump whether he’s right; what matters is that he wants us to believe he’s right. Many of his misstatements, taken individually, may be fairly innocent or at least commonplace, but the brazenness and frequency of the falsehoods, and their evident expedience, are what set Trump apart. Moreover, his typical response to being called out is to double down on a falsehood—like denying that he backed the 2003 Iraq invasion and the 2011 Libya intervention—or to pretend he never uttered it, showing an egregious unconcern or contempt for truth that taxes even the generous standards of political discourse.