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There, at the White House podium where presidential spokespeople had represented the views of American presidents for decades, Sean Spicer waxed not so eloquently about how President Donald Trump’s inauguration crowd was . It wasn’t of course, and thus began the new normal of presidential press conferences, where Spicer, Anthony Scaramucci, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kellyanne Conway, Kayleigh McEnany and others have told the American people lies on behalf of their president.

There has always been a certain wink-and-a-nod relationship between political reporters and press secretaries, whose job it has always been to present the news in the best possible version for their bosses. There are times, or have been, when there is no good version of the truth for a president, or governor or senator, and thus, the spokesman offers a “no comment,� or gives a statement to a reporter that the reporter properly ignores because it is immaterial to the topic at hand.

But from that first lie Spicer told, to where we are today, where the president is in a hospital bed being treated for COVID-19, and the White House has from doctors, and the chief of staff offers contradictory information about the president’s health, this “new normal� has reached a place of epic madness, where the American people cannot trust anything that comes from the mouths of either the president or the people who speak for him.

When Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden declared during the debate, “Everybody knows the president is a liar,� .

That’s a tragedy, no matter your politics.

For a couple of decades in my career I’ve dealt regularly with political spokespeople for Democrats and Republicans. The intensity is heightened during a presidential campaign year, in which there are multiple layers of such spokespeople for both parties of major candidates, pitching stories and offering their daily version of the truth. For nearly all of my career, there has been a line that members of both parties don’t cross in such interactions, lest they lose all credibility for the next election or the one after that: Don’t lie.

That rule, in the Age of Trump, no longer applies to too many Republicans, and it seeps down into local politics. Perhaps the best example in Missouri is the ongoing debate over Amendment 3, that initiative on the Nov. 3 ballot through which the Republicans who control the Missouri Legislature are trying to overturn the will of voters who passed Clean Missouri in 2018.

That amendment did a lot of things, but key among its provisions was to change the way legislative districts are drawn, to make them less partisan, less extreme, and to limit the ability of lawmakers to intervene to draw districts that protect their own incumbency. It’s no wonder that lawmakers don’t want to give up that power, but it’s beyond the pale that they tried to lie to voters about it.

The good news is that Cole County Circuit Judge Patricia Joyce, who called the wording of Amendment 3 written by lawmakers “misleading, insufficient and unfair,� and two successive panels of Missouri judges called them on their lies. That means the version voters will see on their ballot is more honest, at least telling voters that the writers of the ballot initiative are trying to undo their previous vote.

But the new wording barely breaks the surface of the intentional deceit behind the amendment, which seeks for the first time in the nation to not count children as citizens when drawing legislative districts, and would likely discriminate against people of color and decrease their representation. The amendment is a blatant power grab, and that is the reason for the lies.

That, sadly, is the parallel with the Trump administration. The president, it seems, can’t help it but lie, but those around him do so to protect their own power, at the expense of the future of American democracy.

In November, voters can reset the truth meter, and turn back the clock on this disturbing trend in American politics.