Clinton and Trump are both liars, but only one recognizes truth exists

This election is a choice between Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, a legislator who is most at home with political minutia, and Republican nominee Donald Trump, a big picture businessman painting in what can be considered (only kindly) the broadest of brushstrokes.

{mosads}Clinton and Trump are two of the oldest candidates ever to run for president, giving the public a lifetime of missteps to examine. The way that each of these candidates addresses their shortcomings renders them both inauthentic but in different ways.

For Clinton, it’s the perpetual intrusion of her past and for Trump, it’s his woefully inadequate knowledge of foreign and domestic issues. Yet while Clinton struggles with her relationship with the truth, Trump is not bound by it at all.

The former Secretary of State struggles with authenticity because she obscures her mistakes with details.

She parses statements regarding her private email server to highlight certain things while hiding others. Her goal is to bend reality using her intellect and thereby insulate herself from attacks. She is disciplined and cautious, but often convoluted as she tries to thread the needle between the full truth and her more flattering cherry picked version.

In July of 2015, Clinton stated that “everything I did was permitted” because “there was no law, there was no regulation” concerning the use of private email.

But noting the lack of a specific law obscures the fact that she ignored standard State Department procedures that everyone else understood and practiced.

As scrutiny grew, Clinton changed her rhetoric but not her tactics. At a news conference in Ankeny, Iowa the next month, Clinton declared that she had “never sent nor received any email that was marked classified.”

This shiny new detail is not only a nifty way of admitting that she did in fact send and receive classified information (even if unmarked) but also obscures that the Secretary of State (of all people) should have known better.

There’s more.

In an interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace this July, Clinton claimed that her recent interview with FBI Director James Comey confirmed what she has said all along: that her statements to the public regarding her email server were truthful.

But, he didn’t say that. Rather, Comey said that her statements to the FBI were truthful, not her public statements. A week later, she excused herself for this deception claiming that she “may have short-circuited.”

Huh?

What Clinton means is that she later realized that she had taken her deception too far and had to take it back. She had oversold her preferred version of the truth and she knew it.

As political machinations go, Clinton’s modus operandi is relatively garden variety.

She rarely admits fault, sows doubt, and waits for damaging revelations to blow over. It’s no surprise that she behaves like a lawyer on the campaign trail — that’s how she was trained. Her political maneuvers are less noteworthy than the sense of entitlement that gets her into trouble in the first place.  

Trump is more creative than Clinton. He has to be because often he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

He fills in the vacuum of his policy knowledge with lies, bombast, and dangerous (though often crowd-pleasing) improvisation. The distorted reality he peddles includes fabricated people, events, and conversations. His statements are simple and decisive, giving the impression of a tough talking straight shooter. But, there’s a problem: they are often not true.

During an interview with Bill O’Reilly in August, Trump described a conversation he had with a high level Chicago police officer. Trump claimed the two discussed Chicago’s crime problem and how certain tough policy initiatives could largely clear things up within a week. The problem: this officer doesn’t exist.

A spokesman from the Chicago Police Department came out two days later with a statement noting that no one from the senior command ever spoke with Trump.

Of course, Trump nor anyone from his campaign ever identified this individual. They couldn’t. Because he’s an apparition.

Other examples abound.

The celebrations of Muslim residents in Jersey City on 9/11 that Trump, and only Trump, claims he witnessed; a fabricated conversation with House Speaker Paul Ryan after the New York primary; and a fictional letter from the NFL that supposedly expressed regret that the debates will coincide with Monday Night Football.

Trump is right about one thing. He’s offering the country something new: a presidential candidate who will conjure people and events for his own political purpose.

Who does that?

The answer cannot be the leader of the free world.

Trump lies not only to justify his tough talk but also to fill in the gap where real experience should be. He’s padding his resume as he goes along. And he wouldn’t do it if he didn’t feel at his core inadequate and unprepared for the job he’s running for.

The public and press have largely tolerated Trump’s lying. Perhaps we expect him to learn. Or maybe we don’t care because it’s comforting to simplify our dangerous world with foreign policies like “knocking the hell out of ISIS.”

The only thing more disturbing than Trump’s distorted reality is watching his running mate Indiana Gov. Mike Pence contort himself in interview after interview trying to defend his outrageous statements.

Yes, Clinton has her issues. But it’s better to know more about the world than less. And better to struggle with the truth than to not even try.

McGowan is an adjunct professor of psychology at William Paterson University and stay-at-home dad living in Northern New Jersey.

The views of Contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill