What should reporters do when they’re confronted with this kind of blizzard of baloney? There aren’t any easy answers. Though some publications employ fact checkers who pick out certain claims they think are meaningful enough to investigate at length, if you’re covering a Trump rally or press conference and you decide to explain all the things he said that were false, that would make up the entirety of your story and there would be no time or space to address anything else.

And if a reporter for a major news organization described this matter accurately — that Trump is an unusually enthusiastic liar whose falsehoods come in such quantity that they’re difficult to keep up with — she’d be accused of abandoning her objectivity.

The real genius of Trump’s mendacity lies in its brazenness. One of the assumptions behind the fact-checking enterprise is that politicians are susceptible to being shamed: If they lie, you can expose the lie and then they’ll be less likely to repeat it. After all, nobody wants to be tarred as a liar. But what happens when you’re confronted with a politician who is utterly without shame? You can reveal where he’s lied, explain all the facts, and try as hard as you can to inoculate the public against his falsehoods. But by the time you’ve done that, he has already told 10 more lies.