Is It Possible To Be A Genuine Liar?

Matt Taibbi thinks so.

It doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes I find a single paragraph in a long piece that is so completely appalling that the one paragraph requires close analysis. Last Friday, Matt Taibbi uttered this:

And this is what people don’t get about Trump either, is that despite the fact that Trump lies almost constantly, or he says things that are factually not correct almost constantly, I think that’s fair to say that somewhere in almost every address, he says something that’s factually not right.

But that is genuinely who he is on the stump. When he talks to people, they’re not left with any delusion about who it is that is standing in front of them. Maybe he’s not quite as rich as he presents himself to be, but that is Donald Trump.

This is from the transcript of his Friday podcast with Walter Kirn. In the middle of a long complaint about Harris and Walz being ‘inauthentic,’ Matt Taibbi praises Donald Trump for being a really good liar. Taibbi is, literally, saying that Trump lies every time he says something but that this is somehow more truthful than Kamala Harris, who has an unplaceable accent.¹Apparently, it is in Taibbi’s world possible to be such an inveterate, constant scammer that lying becomes one’s true nature.

At no point does Taibbi suggest that having the President of the United States be someone who says ‘something factually not right’ — Matt, check your Thesaurus; the word for ‘factually not right’ is LIE — every time he speaks might be a really bad thing. It’s actually difficult to analyze Taibbi’s statement here because what else is there to say about someone who admits that the candidate he wants to win in November is a habitual, constant liar?

Perhaps the fact that Taibbi himself has a real problem with the truth makes him identify with Trump. Here is an excellent column by the author of BoyMom, discussing just how dishonest Taibbi’s review of her book was. He took quotes out of context, spliced quotes from on chapter onto others from different places in the book, and generally just lied and insulted Whippman without once engaging with the actual message of her book. (I wrote about Taibbi’s godawful review last week and Whippman herself made a sweet comment on my review.)

Taibbi portrays himself as an investigative journalist, bravely exposing the fact that the government occasionally asked Twitter not to publish dangerous lies. The fact that he admires liars like Trump and lies so openly in book reviews should teach any reasonable person that he is, in fact, an overpaid hack who hates women more than anything else. I’m going to give the last word to Fred Astaire and Jane Powell here:

1. From the Transcript: Walter Kirn: Yeah. But what I’m going to say, this is another observation. I could give you the regional origins of three of the four candidates. I know Donald Trump is from New York. I can even tell he’s from the boroughs. I can tell you JD Vance is a Midwesterner. He’s a polished Midwesterner, but that’s where he comes from. He’s not a Californian, and he’s not an East Coast prep school …

I can tell Tim Walz, even though he overdoes it, is from the Midwest. He’s a Midwesterner playing a big Midwesterner. But if Kamala Harris walked into a room, and I pride myself on this, I use linguistic detection, and accents, and expressions, and the way people stand, I couldn’t tell you where she grew up, where she lived.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. I had the identical reaction to her when I first saw her on the stump is the only thing I know about her is that she’s not from Boston. Everything else is a total mystery to me.

What language is that? What accent is that? I’m not really sure. Maybe that’s a California thing that I’m just not familiar with, but yeah. You’re right. And Trump is-