It is entirely OK to express LIES too.

Sometimes, yes. Sometimes not.

There is room for exaggeration of the kind you highlighted. "Wants to raise everybody's taxes by four times" is something I can let go as a rhetorical device - overstating something for effect.

But lies can also be destructive when they are an attempt to pass the lie off as actual fact, like my voter fraud example earlier in the thread. Those lies are not OK, and never will be.

Presidents - and politicians in general - have always used both. But they use them in the right time and right place. What Trump has done over the past several years as a politician has gone far beyond the expected use of lies. He is constantly going in the dangerous direction with them, to the point where his supporters actually believe many of them as truth. The attack on the Capitol is another example. It's very hard to look at any individual statement from Trump in the days and hours leading up to the attack and say that some lie was OK and others were not. But when you instead switch points of view and talk to the attackers, time after time you hear them saying that the President told them to do it - that they were following his instructions.

When your supporters start saying things like that, you have crossed the line into lies that are destructive.

--Peter