CHRIS HAYES (HOST): Many political observers view lies by politicians as inevitable,
but Donald Trump is not really a politician. And here’s the thing, he is making politicians look downright trustworthy. Joining me now, Eric Boehlert, senior fellow at Media Matters. To me what has been the challenge -- that's just 42 seconds. But there's just the complete casualness of the disregard for anything remotely factual
ERIC BOEHLERT: There has been a complaint from the press that there's sort of this avalanche of lies. How are we going to deal with this? Usually if we catch a nominee making one or two false statements a week, that's a lot of news. We're doing our job. How do you handle 18, 19 in a day, or something like that? So in one sense I'm sympathetic to that claim. On the other sense though, there has to be an overall coverage of treating him not seriously. Of just making this point over and over, he is congenital serial liar. He's not a normal politician, as you say. He's not an entertainer. He's just sort of a narcissist who can't speak the truth for any length of time.
HAYES: Isn't it the press' job to make that determination or is it the press' job just to individually do the thing like what we just did, [and show] it is not true?
BOEHLERT: So a good example is he gave this joke climate speech yesterday, right? A couple of weeks [ago] he gave that joke foreign policy speech. A lot of newsrooms felt like,OK he's the Republican nominee, we have to take this seriously, we have to do five, ten paragraphs regurgitating what he says, then we’ll get some quotes from people who say he doesn't know what he's talking about.
HAYES: You think that model is poorly applied.
BOEHLERT: It does not apply. As we were talking earlier in the show, nothing applies to him. So why are we still pretending he's Mitt Romney ,or John McCain, or Bob Dole? This is his policy statement? It's not a policy statement. It's incoherent. It doesn't make any sense. And Republicans in his own party, the foreign policy speech, they're like, what is this? So I don't think the old model applies and they should get rid of it. I don't necessarily know exactly what they should do but you can't pretend someone is serious who is not serious for 90 seconds a day.
