Charles Blow nails Trump's dishonesty: Political lies sound slick — but ‘clumsy, folksy lies’ sound true

President Donald Trump has uttered a fusillade of falsehoods during both his campaign and presidency, yet his supporters think of him as a bold truth-teller.

That's because Trump, who does not read books, uses bite-sized words anyone can understand, according to New York Times columnist Charles Blow.

"Trumpian language is a thing unto itself: some manner of sophistry peppered with superlatives," Blow wrote. "It is a way of speech that defies the Reed-Kellogg sentence diagram. It is a jumble of incomplete thoughts stitched together with arrogance and ignorance. America is suffering under the tyranny of gibberish spouted by the lord of his faithful 46 percent."

Researchers have found that Trump has a smaller vocabulary than any other president and only one other president -- George W. Bush -- used worse grammar, and Blow said his rhetorical simplicity tricks his followers into trusting him.

"Here is the great danger: Many people expect a political lie to sound slick, to be delivered by intellectual elites spouting $5 words," Blow said. "A clumsy, folksy lie delivered by a shyster using broken English reads as truth."