Adam Gopnik, "Trying (and Failing) Not to Fear So Much about Trump," Daily Comment, The New Yorker, February 17, 2017

The falsehood that Trump tells about the three million fake voters in the Presidential election is typical. No sane person—not merely no other politician but no one you have ever known—would make a claim of that kind: so obviously crazy and inarguably false, implying an impossible set of human circumstances. Their effect is not merely to comfort his ego but permanently to discomfit our democracy. This is not “I am not a crook”; it is not a claim that there are weapons of mass destruction; it is not “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” These are all ways of parsing reality, or normal fibs told by normal people. Trump’s falsehoods are deliberate attempts to warp the entire field of veracity, so as to defy the simplest parameters of sanity. From now on, whatever happens, no election will be convincing to his followers—not the midterms, not the next Presidential one.