John Kearney is a retired philosophy professor who taught at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He has lived in Waterloo, Iowa for the past six years.

After twenty-eight years of distinguished service, ABC national correspondent Terry Moran is out of a job. He was recently informed that his contract with ABC will not be renewed. The network determined that Moran’s late-night post on X about White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller violated journalistic standards.

Moran’s June 8 post described Miller as “a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred. He’s a world-class hater. You can see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate.”

Moran appeared to be leveling an ad hominem attack.

As a journalist, Terry Moran must adhere to ethical standards that don’t apply to the rest of us. Reason Magazine editor Robby Soave recently noted, “Mainstream media organizations have different rules for news reporters and opinion commentators, and it’s possible that Moran violated his company’s social media policy. He has a First Amendment right vis a vis the U.S. government, not with respect to ABC.”

But Soave also pointed out that “these prohibitions on reporters sharing their own opinions on social media seem increasingly outdated. […] Expecting journalists to conceal their perspectives seems quaint and not exactly useful.”

On June 9, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt described Moran’s remarks as “unhinged and unacceptable.”

That‘s rich! I wonder what Karoline Leavitt would say if a member of the White House press corps asked her if she ever considers her own boss’s remarks “unhinged and unacceptable.”

President Donald Trump is on record as making thousands of false statements since he became a public figure.

Calling someone a “liar” usually does not mean that a person has told just one or two lies. The “liar” label refers to a person who, on a regular basis, makes false statements with the clear intention to deceive others. When Trump first became president, some journalists were reluctant to call his false statements “lies” because of the difficulty in knowing another person’s intentions. Isn’t it possible that someone is just exaggerating or saying something they wrongly believe to be true?

The days of such journalistic reluctance are over. Even a growing number of Trump partisans are willing to concede that he has a tendency to lie. But they argue he has kept a lot of his campaign promises and made the country safer. Accordingly, we should cut him some slack if and when he plays fast and loose with the truth. Just hold your collective noses and put up with the falsehoods.

Does it really matter if Trump claims that gas prices are under two dollars a gallon, that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy started the war between Russia and Ukraine, or that the 2020 election was stolen despite clear and convincing evidence to the contrary?

The common refrain: “That’s just Trump being Trump!”

Really?

Suppose your good friend Pete, over time, morphed into a habitual liar. Would you ever want to catch yourself saying, “That’s just Pete being Pete?” I would not, and I submit that most people would not. So, why should any of us let Trump off the hook?

There is always a chance things could go south for the president. What if the Russia-Ukraine war does not end, or his tariffs policy leads the country into a recession, or the Supreme Court continues to check his unconstitutional maneuvers, or the Democrats right their political ship and win the midterm elections? If enough of those things happen, then Trump’s lying may finally catch up with him. The very citizens who got him elected may turn against him.

That said, the disturbing fact is that many citizens continue to believe Trump’s lies. But what makes people believe things that are not true?

Stephanie Grisham told CNN last year that when she was Trump’s press secretary during his first term, the president used to tell her: “‘go out there and say this’,” and “if it was false, he would say ‘it doesn’t matter. Stephanie, just say it over and over and over again, people will believe it’.”

The idea is that you can utter a statement that is totally at odds with the facts. But as long as you keep repeating it, an apparent falsehood can become a truth.

So, if a citizen repeatedly hears that Zelenskyy started the war between Ukraine and Russia from an authority figure held in high esteem on grounds of perceived accomplishments, that person can come to believe Zelenskyy actually was responsible for starting the war.

But sheer repetition does not make a statement or belief true. Facts are rather stubborn things. They are states of affairs or happenings that make our beliefs true. Why do we believe that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963? Because the historical fact of his assassination on that day makes it true. To think otherwise is to be sadly mistaken or misinformed.

Someone can repeat the claim that “Kennedy was not assassinated” or that “the Holocaust never happened” ad nauseam. It cannot and will not change the facts.

For the next 43 months, I will do my best to avoid being worn down by the steady drumbeat of falsehoods I expect to emanate from the present occupant of the White House. I encourage my fellow citizens to do the same. The alternative is to live in an illusory world where facts do not matter.

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Top image: President Donald Trump participates in Session I of the G7 Summit on June 16, 2025, in Kananaskis, Alberta, Canada. Official White House photo by Daniel Torok.