Trump’s truth: the dinner-table standard
Call it the Lewandowski Doctrine: the proposition that in evaluating the statements of a candidate for president of the United States, the proper standard to apply is, How would this sound coming from my brother-in-law at the kitchen table?
Specifically, Lewandowski, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, speaking at a forum Thursday night at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, was criticizing what he considered the media’s myopic focus on the accuracy of Trump’s statements during the campaign. “This is the problem with the media. You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally,” Lewandowski said. “The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes — when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar — you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.”
That’s just human nature. “The Guinness Book of World Records” was, in fact, created precisely for this eventuality, to settle pub bets over whether Secretariat could have beaten Seabiscuit in his prime. But there is no equivalent mechanism for correcting a presidential candidate who time after time during the campaign — and even afterwards — made statements with no basis in fact whatsoever. Lewandowski’s view is that for a large part of the electorate — large enough to win, at least by the measure of Electoral College votes — it didn’t matter. He appears to be right.
