Hillary Clinton's impossible challenge: Fact-checking Donald Trump at the debate

When Donald Trump came out last Friday and finally gave up his long effort to convince people of the lie that Barack Obama was born somewhere other than the United States — and in the process told two more brazen lies, that Hillary Clinton and her 2008 campaign started the birther controversy, and "I finished it" — some news organizations had plainly had enough.

They described the event using blunt terms of a kind they ordinarily shy away from, saying not merely that Trump "strayed from the truth" or "made a claim at odds with the facts" but simply that he "lied." As New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet later told Quartz, "we have decided to be more direct in calling things out when a candidate actually lies." Many of his colleagues are feeling the same way.

This didn't happen just because the particular lies Trump told were so blatant and obvious. It came after over a year in which Trump proved himself to be nothing less than the most dishonest candidate in living memory, by an incalculable margin.

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Which raises an immediate question for his opponent Hillary Clinton. On Monday, the two candidates will meet for their first debate, one that could be among the most watched in history. How is she going to react when Trump lies?

Because he will, of that there's no doubt. It's possible that at some point in the debate, Clinton will say something untrue. But it is an absolute certainty that Donald Trump will not only lie, but will lie multiple times. He is constitutionally incapable of doing otherwise. I'm fairly certain that there has not been a single speech or event in this campaign where he didn't say things that were obviously, demonstrably untrue. One journalist, Daniel Dale, has made documenting Trump's lies something of a hobby; to take an example, he counted 12 different lies Trump told just on Monday.

This is what he does. Trump lies about big things and small things, about himself and other people, about the past and the future. And while Trump's unending stream of falsehood has led some news organizations to attempt fact-checking him on the fly, it's unlikely that the debate moderators will do so. The moderator of the final debate, Fox News' Chris Wallace, has already said, "I do not believe that it's my job to be a truth squad. It's up to the other person to catch them on that." The other moderators will probably take the same approach. Which means we could have a lot of exchanges that sound like this:

Now let's imagine you're a member of the audience, and you didn't actually know what the truth was. What would you conclude? Trump says one thing, Clinton says something else. Who knows?

That's precisely how Trump gets away with so much dishonesty: Most people don't read fact-checks, and even if they hear a reporter say Trump isn't telling the truth, they'll discount it if they like him. He also gets backup from his allies. For instance, after his birther event, Republicans fanned out to repeat the lie about Clinton being the first one to question Obama's birthplace; every Sunday show that weekend featured some Republican saying confidently that the whole thing really was started by her. No matter how many times the shows' hosts contradicted them, they plowed right ahead, insisting it was true.

And while they may not have been able to convince everyone, they've probably convinced most Republicans to go along with this new story. That's how information and positions get spread: The elite of the party, like politicians and media figures, repeats an idea over and over, and as their partisans in the rank and file hear it coming from the figures they trust, they adopt it as their own. For those in the middle, it's just one more dispute between the parties, and the truth must lie somewhere in the middle.

Right now Hillary Clinton is busily preparing for the debate, practicing, going over briefing books, and devising strategies with her advisers. But has she come up with an answer to this conundrum? When faced with an opponent who will happily lie and won't care if he gets corrected, what do you do?

I wish I had the answer to that question, but I don't. Of course, I also don't have an army of pollsters and staff at my disposal whom I can order to figure it out. But one thing Clinton should understand is that she can't count on the press coming to her defense afterward.

In ordinary elections, post-debate coverage plays a key role in determining how we understand what happened. Reporters home in on a few moments that were supposed to be decisive (particularly the key "gaffes") and repeat them over and over, leaving those moments to be all anyone remembers of the debate. But it might not be the same this year, even if there are plentiful fact-checks and explanations.

That's because Trump is unlike any other candidate we've seen. He isn't chastened when he's caught lying, and he isn't shy about creating an alternate reality in which his supporters will live. As soon as the debate ends, he will proudly tell reporters that all the polls are saying he won (even if no polls have been taken yet), and everybody is telling him how great he did. And the people supporting him will lap up every word, no matter what a bunch of lowdown anti-Trump journalists tell them. After all, it's the journalists who are the liars, right? Donald Trump is the only one you can really trust.