President Donald Trump lies. A lot. While this is often noted when it happens — on Twitter, in fact-checks or in articles — the sheer number of falsehoods means some slip through the cracks, and the actual impact can be lost. S.V. Dáte, our White House correspondent and a longtime journalist, wrote earlier this month about the many untrue statements from the president and the White House, and why they matter.
We talked to Dáte about writing the piece, which departed from his usual work, and why exposing the president's lies is so important.
You noted on Twitter that you don't usually write pieces like this. Can you share more about what you meant by that?
I’ve always thought of myself as a news journalist, not an opinion writer. My job is to reflect the world as it exists, not as how I’d like it to be. This article was somewhat of a departure from that.
Why write this piece now?
I decided that Donald Trump and his enablers were undermining the very foundations of civil democratic society by attacking truth itself. This is different in kind, not just degree, from disagreements over issues — health care, banking, even abortion. We can’t as a society make rational decisions if we permit the notion that everyone is entitled to his or her own facts.
The piece gets into journalists' reticence to accuse someone of lying, something that's changed somewhat during the Trump era. Do you think that shift is a positive one?
I don’t, actually. I do think almost all people lie at some point. Some, maybe most, of that is well-meaning. We try not to hurt people’s feelings. A mother who tells her son to tell grandma that he loved the birthday sweater is, technically, teaching him to lie.
That’s why what Trump has done has been so, so corrosive. Yes, just about everyone lies, but pretty much nobody lies like Trump. On big, important matters on which everyone has a fundamental right to the truth. That is what I meant when I wrote that most politicians don’t lie. They don’t, not on things that really matter.
There are many, many Trump lies to choose from. How did you pick which examples to use in your piece, and particularly which to start the article with?
Two things. I wanted to show that his lies not only can be dangerous but actually have been dangerous. And I wanted a news hook for the impeachment. The Miss Universe example served perfectly for the latter, because it was all but forgotten in real time, with the focus on the meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which, of course, is central to the impeachment. And I wanted to get deep into the hurricane thing because I think people laughed at Sharpie-gate without really appreciating how reckless that was. | 
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