Lawrence Downes describes Kellyanne Conway, and Trump, correctly as bald-faced liars, in Trump, Trapped in His Lies, Keeps Lying. Sad! They’ve a certain kind of lie, though: one that rests in the idea that nothing’s outwardly determinable, and that, in fact, there are no discernible facts. See, along these lines, For Mr. Trump, It’s STEM, Schwem, Whatever… (Trump “insists that the truth is indeterminable whenever he wishes to evade responsibility for his own lies”).
Here’s Downes describing Trump and his doppelgänger Conway:
Mr. Trump’s mouthpiece, Kellyanne Conway, went on TV on Monday to defend her boss. “He has debunked this so many times,” she said, casually contorting the meaning of “debunked.” (She meant “pathetically denied.”)
“Why is everything taken at face value?” she said. “You can’t give him the benefit of the doubt on this and he’s telling you what was in his heart? You always want to go by what’s come out of his mouth rather than look at what’s in his heart.”
This is where things got really weird. Ms. Conway’s quote is a glimpse into the heart of darkness that a Trump presidency portends. She wants us to swallow Mr. Trump’s reality without question. To accept only what he says now — not what he said then — over the evidence seen and heard by our own eyes and ears. She wants us to overcome the dissonance by looking for the “truth” in his heart.
They’ve both a post-empirical dishonesty: the truth for them cannot be observed, cannot be measured, although they and the circumstances they describe are both within the same created order. Some liars will point to flimsy facts, etc.; Conway and Trump often don’t bother to point to anything tangible at all.
They’d not deny (presumably) that trees, cats, and people can be observed and measured; they’d say that those events and circumstances that might refute their own political claims retreat from measurement, to be found (conveniently for them) in their own hearts.
For Conway this may be a lucrative sophistry; for Trump it’s likely characterological.