A new Marist poll takes the novel step of asking registered voters which is more off-putting in an occupant of the Oval Office: dishonesty or excessive age. The results are surprising, and along with other polling along these lines, it should influence how Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s relative qualifications for the presidency are covered from here on out.
The poll asked: Which is more concerning in a president, someone who doesn’t tell the truth, or someone who might be too old to serve? The results were lopsided: By 68 to 32 percent, respondents were more concerned about the lying than the aging. Given the relentless media focus on presidential age of late, that’s simply remarkable.
While the poll doesn’t directly compare Trump and Biden on that particular question, it also finds that 52 percent of Americans say Biden has the “character to serve as president,” whereas only 43 percent say this about Trump. Fifty-six percent say Trump lacks the character to serve, which surely reflects public perceptions of Trump’s dishonesty.
The new Marist poll, by the way, also shows Biden leading Trump by 50 to 48 percent. But that’s out of sync with polling averages, so we should be cautious about that finding. Still, even if the overall poll is off by a few points, the numbers on dishonesty and age remain striking.
Trump was probably the most dishonest president in U.S. history. His lies and distortions topped 30,000 during his presidency, according to The Washington Post. That has continued unabated: CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale tallied up over 30 lies from Trump at the recent presidential debate, while Biden’s falsehoods amounted to maybe a third of that. Critically, many of Trump’s whoppers were far more gargantuan lies—such as the claim that Democratic states execute babies—leading Dale to describe Trump’s lying as “staggering.”
Voters grasp Trump’s world-historical levels of dishonesty. This week’s Pew poll found that only 36 percent of voters view Trump as “honest.” By contrast, 48 percent view Biden that way—not good enough, clearly, but Biden’s large advantage here is especially notable given that as president, he has been subjected to a far harsher media spotlight for the last four years.
What the new Marist poll adds to this debate is the idea that voters see excessive lying as a serious problem in a president. Yet ask yourself this: How often is Trump’s lying covered that way? Trump’s dishonesty is rarely treated as a sign of his temperamental unfitness for the presidency. Biden’s age, of course, is constantly covered as an important factor in determining his fitness for the office. Biden’s age should be covered this way, to be clear. But so should Trump’s relentless lying.
The key distinction here is between mental unfitness for the presidency (where Biden does very badly, relative to Trump), and temperamental unfitness for that majestic office. On the latter, Quinnipiac found earlier this year Biden does significantly better than Trump does, with an extraordinary 61 percent saying Trump is temperamentally unfit for the presidency.
Temperamental unfitness also matters! And honesty is central to that. So along these lines, what might coverage of Trump’s serial lying look like?
Well, The New York Times offers a clue in its much-discussed new editorial depicting Trump as unfit to lead our country. It labeled the fact that Trump “lies blatantly and maliciously” as one of numerous qualities that render him “morally unfit” for the presidency. Such lies, the editorial notes, “wrong the country.”
What’s also at issue is what Trump lies relentlessly about. His constant denigration of official government statistics that don’t flatter him, his deranged downplaying of a pandemic that killed unbearable numbers of Americans, his nonstop falsehoods about the integrity of our elections, his relentless depiction of the violent January 6 insurrection as rooted in legitimate grievances, as a display of patriotism and heroism—all of this extracts untold civic costs.
As The Bulwark’s William Saletan effectively demonstrates, Republican voters in particular are adjusting to Trump’s serial debasements—from lying about extramarital affairs to sleazy hush-money payments, to committing felony-level crimes, to demands for absolute immunity—by downgrading their moral expectations associated with leadership on all these fronts. Beyond this impact on MAGA voters, all the lying treats countless other ordinary people with a kind of contempt for basic standards of public life that seems incompatible with a decent society.
It’s not easy to say what news coverage of Trump’s lying as a potentially disqualifying trait might look like. It could involve news analysis pieces that pick at the lying from a number of different angles: What experts say about the civic degradation caused by such gale-force levels of dishonesty, what the eager embrace of totalitarian-style propaganda has portended in other countries, and so forth.
But one thing that coverage should not do is to treat Trump’s lying as savvy or well-executed politics. Note this bizarre passage from a recent Times piece:
At his marathon rallies, Mr. Trump, using a teleprompter but often going on riffs without it, speaks for upward of 90 minutes. He tells outrageous lies. He employs hateful language. He mixes up names, dates and places.
But the bombastic former president—who at 78 is three years younger than Mr. Biden and with his heavyset frame appears far more physically imposing—does it all with prodigious stamina. Polls show that voters have fewer concerns about Mr. Trump’s age than Mr. Biden’s.
Trump spews lies and hate regularly, but, hey, he does it with an effective display of performative gusto! Oh, well—it’s all just an inevitable background condition of our politics in the Trump era. But news organizations can choose to not treat Trump’s lying this way, and find a better approach. Another problem: Media fact checks are often cordoned off from other types of stories. There has to be some way to better integrate fact-checking into the daily drumbeat of news coverage.
Joe Kahn, executive editor of the Times, recently told Erik Wemple that the paper’s intense focus on Biden’s age is appropriate, because it’s “one of the most important issues on voters’ minds.” That’s true, and again, Biden’s age absolutely is a critical issue. But if the Marist poll is right, far more voters are concerned about dishonesty in a president than about decline associated with aging. Perhaps it’s time to cover Trump’s lying accordingly.
As for making this a political issue that does more damage to Trump—by casting his bottomless dishonesty as a disqualifier, for instance—that’s on Biden and Democrats. Between these Marist numbers and others showing large percentages of Americans view Trump as the shameless liar that he is, the pieces are all there. Democrats just have to put them together.
