A few days ago, President Trump stood before a Republican midterm convention in Dallas and promised that every adult American would receive a $5,000 “Trump Dividend” if Republicans retain control of Congress in November. The proposal immediately caught my attention, although probably not for the reason Trump intended. The mechanics were murky. Such a payment would require congressional authorization and could cost more than $1 trillion. House Speaker Mike Johnson quickly emphasized that Congress would have to approve it and that the details would need to be worked out. Trump, meanwhile, reiterated the proposal days later and said fitting it into the federal budget would be “easy.”
Maybe some version of it eventually becomes legislation. Maybe it doesn’t. I have no idea. What interested me was how quickly the promise itself became real in some people’s minds—the way a political statement can move almost instantly from something a politician said to something I expect to receive. That reaction sent me down a much more personal rabbit hole, because I realized that I have spent most of my life operating according to almost the opposite instinct. Once someone demonstrates that they are willing to knowingly distort reality for their own benefit, their word changes value for me. I don’t necessarily assume that everything they say afterward is false. I simply stop treating the fact that they said it as evidence that it is true.
I have apparently been this way since I was a kid. Hypocrisy bothered me early, sometimes long before I had the maturity or tact to know what to do with that irritation. I called it out in family, friends, teachers, institutions, and eventually myself. That last part became the most important, because it is very easy to build an identity around being the person who recognizes everyone else’s bullshit. The harder practice is noticing your own. Where am I bending reality because reality is inconvenient? Where have I created an explanation that conveniently makes me the hero? Where am I defending a belief because changing it would embarrass me? Where am I demanding consistency from somebody else that I don’t demand from myself? If the standard only points outward, it isn’t really a standard. It’s just another strategy for protecting the ego.
Over time, I developed something close to a one-pass rule for intentional dishonesty. Family, friends, coworkers, politicians—it doesn’t matter much to me who you are. If I discover that you’ve knowingly lied to me, something fundamental changes in the relationship. Before that moment, you told me X can itself be a reason to tentatively believe X. Afterward, it becomes you told me X; now show me. Trust shifts the burden of proof. That probably sounds severe, but I’ve never been able to understand the alternative very well. If I know that someone is willing to manipulate my understanding of reality when it suits them, why would I continue outsourcing pieces of my reality to their testimony?
And yet, there is an enormous exception to all of this.
I love storytellers.
Storytellers lie constantly.
I’ve heard stories told around tables and in bars that have evolved over twenty years until I am reasonably certain the current version shares only partial genetic material with the event that actually happened. I’ve told those stories too. Three conversations become one. Two people become a composite character. Somebody’s mildly funny response gets replaced by the devastating line everyone wishes they had actually delivered. The timing gets tightened. The fish grows. The thunderstorm arrives at precisely the correct moment. I don’t merely tolerate that kind of distortion; I love it.
For a while, that seemed inconsistent with how seriously I take honesty. Eventually I realized it isn’t inconsistent at all, because the contract is completely different. A storyteller isn’t usually trying to corrupt my model of reality in order to gain an advantage over me. They’re trying to transmit an experience. Sometimes factual precision isn’t even where the deepest truth of an experience lives. The literal sequence of events may have been boring and disjointed: we arrived at 7:42, somebody said something mildly irritating, twenty minutes later someone responded, and eventually everybody laughed. But the truth of the experience might have been tension, embarrassment, absurdity, love, fear or joy. A good storyteller rearranges the furniture so you can finally see the room.
That realization gave me a sentence that I think describes my relationship with truth better than anything I’ve come up with before:
Reality can survive a little jazz. It’s the con I hate.
There is an enormous difference between getting reality wrong and intentionally manipulating somebody else’s understanding of it. Human beings get things wrong constantly. Memory is reconstructive. Perception is partial. We inherit assumptions before we’re old enough to examine them. We rationalize our behavior, misread other people’s motives, exaggerate our own importance and confidently believe things that eventually turn out to be nonsense. None of that automatically destroys my trust in someone. In fact, watching a person sincerely discover that they were wrong and correct themselves can make me trust them more. “I was wrong.” “I don’t know.” “I believed that five years ago and I don’t anymore.” Those aren’t weaknesses to me. They’re evidence that someone’s relationship with reality matters more to them than defending the previous version of themselves.
The line gets crossed when the distortion becomes intentional: I know something you don’t know. I know what I’m telling you isn’t true. And I’m going to use the gap between those two things to influence what you believe or what you do. That’s the con. Oddly enough, mundane lies sometimes bother me more than dramatic ones. When people lie under extreme pressure, I can at least understand the temptation. Fear makes people strange. But if someone lies casually about something that barely matters—where they went, what they said, whether they did some insignificant thing—it creates a larger question. If reality is negotiable when almost nothing is at stake, what happens when something actually matters?
This is also part of why intense political loyalty can feel so foreign to me. Politics obviously makes all of us vulnerable to distorted judgment, not just people in one party. A 2025 review of the research on partisan bias found that partisans tend to preferentially seek, believe and remember information that supports their own political identities and affiliations. The authors describe this as a broad feature of political judgment rather than a pathology belonging exclusively to the left or the right.
There is also research specifically examining highly committed Trump supporters. A three-wave study following a sample of core Trump supporters from 2020 through 2024 found a reciprocal relationship between what researchers call identity fusion with Trump and belief in his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Stronger identification predicted increasing belief in the claim, while acceptance of the claim was associated with sustained identification with Trump. The study is about a particular sample of highly committed supporters and shouldn’t be generalized to every Republican or Trump voter, but the mechanism fascinates me because it suggests that a belief can become part of the structure protecting an identity rather than simply another proposition awaiting evidence.
I can understand that mechanism intellectually. Emotionally, it remains difficult for me to inhabit. My instinct is to evaluate the source through the claim. If you repeatedly make claims that prove unreliable or knowingly deceptive, I update my model of you. But when identity becomes deeply attached to the source, the direction can reverse: the source begins determining how the claim itself is evaluated. Contradictory evidence then asks much more of a person than simply admitting, I was wrong about this thing. It may feel like admitting, I was wrong about this person. I defended them. I argued with people I care about. I made choices around this. Maybe some of the people I dismissed were right about something important. The psychological cost of changing one belief has suddenly become the cost of rearranging a piece of the self.
Perhaps this is why I’ve sometimes compared certain kinds of political devotion to unhealthy interpersonal relationships—not because political support and an abusive relationship are literally the same thing, and certainly not because every voter supporting a politician has the same psychology, but because the preservation of the relationship can sometimes become more important than the evaluation of the individual claim. Once that happens, contradictions are surprisingly survivable. The promise fails because somebody else stopped it. The statement was only a joke. It was taken out of context. Circumstances changed. The media distorted it. Any individual explanation may sometimes be true. What interests me is the deeper human capacity to repeatedly find an explanation that preserves the trusted person.
My own machinery seems to run the other direction. The moment I recognize intentional deception, preserving the relationship becomes less important than preserving my ability to trust my own perception.
Maybe that’s ultimately what bothers me about lying. It isn’t simply that lying violates some abstract moral commandment. It’s that intentional deception is relational. If you knowingly lie to me, you’re asking me to participate in a reality that you already know isn’t real. You’re attempting to place something inside my understanding of the world that you yourself do not believe belongs there. You’re using my good faith as raw material.
That is what I can’t stand.
And maybe “truth” isn’t even quite the right word for what I’ve spent my life protecting. I obviously don’t demand literal factual precision from every human interaction. I love fiction. I love myth. I love metaphor. I love absurdity. I love watching ideas evolve. I love changing my mind. I love an outrageous story told by someone who understands exactly how long to wait before delivering the punchline. I even enjoy discovering that something I confidently believed was completely wrong, once I can get my ego out of the way. There is something exhilarating about realizing the universe contains a possibility that wasn’t available to you five minutes earlier.
What I care about is something more like good faith toward reality.
Tell the story. Make the fish bigger. Combine the characters. Move the thunderstorm twenty minutes earlier because that’s where it belongs. Reality will be fine. But don’t knowingly manipulate my understanding of the world because doing so gives you leverage over me. Don’t ask me to pretend not to see what I see. Don’t make me defend something you know isn’t true. And don’t expect your unsupported word to carry exactly the same weight after you’ve demonstrated that you’re willing to use it that way.
That’s the line.
Which is how a strange political promise about a $5,000 check somehow sent me wandering into a question I’ve apparently been asking my entire life. The money became almost beside the point. What interested me was the relationship among belief, evidence, trust, identity and the person doing the speaking. Strip away the politics and something much more intimate remains:
What do we owe one another when we describe reality?
I think we owe one another room for mistakes, faulty memories, changing minds, contradictions, imagination and growth. We should leave space for people to become so different that their former selves would barely recognize them. We should absolutely leave space for mythology, metaphor and a great story.
Reality can survive all of that. Reality can survive a little jazz. It’s the con I hate.