If you said “honesty,” the chances are that you are not a Republican.
“The share of Republicans who say honesty is extremely important has fallen to 49 percent.”
This same stat for Republicans was 71% in 2007. The comparable stat for Democrats and independents has stayed exactly the same since 2007! Why have Republicans changed? Pretty obvious. I think you can blame one specific person. It’s kind of interesting to see how Trump apologists have adapted to reality. At first, they defended Trump’s crazy and obviously false claims, but there is now a new dynamic in play – they admit Trump is a serial liar, and they don’t care.
But take party affiliation out of the analysis and just look at people in general, and the results are fascinating. Without being told who made the false claim, people are more likely to believe a false, wild-eyed assertion by Elizabeth Warren than by Trump.
I guess that Trump’s lies have been generally exposed by the media, but the fact-checkers kind of ignore Warren, so her lies are not universally known to be false. They gave one example of a Warren claim. I was able to identify it as false because it’s so preposterous, but I have never seen it formally debunked. In contrast, the media outlets tend to jump on every single misstatement Trump makes, so I have seen all the counter-arguments to all of his claims. Does that mean the media are biased? Well, maybe. Nobody can ever claim total objectivity. But of course Warren is not the President, and far more intense scrutiny comes with that position.
By the way, I hesitated over the adjective “preposterous” in that paragraph. Something to mull over: should the adjective for an absurdly and obviously inaccurate claim be “Trumpian”?
Another interesting finding: Trump himself is often a victim of the “boy who cried wolf” syndrome – people assume his completely accurate claims are just more of his lies! “Trump often accurately says that the U.S. unemployment rate is at its lowest level in roughly 50 years, but less than half of adults, 47 percent, believe this is true.”
