No matter how many things Ms. Salazar makes up, it seems unfair to liken her to our post-truth president, who lies on a much grander scale and who has the power to do far, far greater damage.

And yet, the willingness of Ms. Salazar’s supporters to look past her fabrications sounds eerily familiar to the justifications Trump supporters made in 2016: Yes, he’s distasteful and prone to exaggeration. But he’s promising to pass policies we like. Supporting him is a price worth paying in pursuit of our goals.

Even the right’s dismissal of anything critical of Mr. Trump as fake news has its left-wing equivalent. On Friday on the website Jacobin, a democratic socialist writer celebrated Ms. Salazar’s win and dismissed the press’s “unprecedented smears.” There was, he says, “no smoking gun” and the whole thing could be chalked up to hostility to her political views — or, worse, to some kind of right-wing conspiracy.