Yesterday my wife read me a quote from a man who was asked why he supported President Donald Trump. The man said, “Because he tells the truth.” That answer is very much at odds with my assessment. I was in a good mood so I thought I could spend some time to try to make sense of this statement.

I began by granting that this person is both honest and intelligent, that he knows what truth is and that he sincerely believes that he has heard President Trump tell it. I also decided to hear his answer very precisely. He did not say that Mr. Trump always tells the truth; not did he say that he never lies or makes things up out of thin air. So this is the answer I hear, “When President Trump is speaking about the issues that are most important to me, he tells the truth.” (“When he is talking about crowd size, or conversations with Ukrainians, or Corona Virus testing, I really don’t care what he says.”)

What truth does President Trump tell that addresses an issue close to his heart? With that question we have left the arena of objective truth that can be fact-checked and entered into subjective truth that is intimately tied to a person’s identity.

Here is a question in that arena that I asked myself and now ask you: “Are you doing as well as you want?” To clarify, I’ll break it down a bit:

• Is your income as high as you would like?
• Are you as successful as you had hoped to be?
• Do you get as much respect as you deserve?
• Are your relationships as fulfilling as you wish they were?
• Have you been treated as fairly as you expect?
• Are you as happy as you want to be?

If you can answer no to any of these questions then Donald Trump speaks a very important truth. He keeps saying, over and over again, “You are not doing as well as you want and expect and deserve.” And that is true for most of us including me. And I would bet that it is both true and important for this Trump supporter.

The problem comes when we ask the next question, “Why am I not doing as well as I want?” That’s a tricky question because most of the common answers are uncomfortable, such as:

• Because the world is random and there is no reward for good or punishment for evil, “Shit happens.”
• Because my expectations are unreasonable and vastly overblown.
• Because of my character flaws, I am dumb or lazy or evil.

There must be a better answer. Donald Trump has it. “You are not doing as well as you deserve because bad people are taking advantage of you.”

This is such an easy answer to one of life’s hardest questions. This might even be the default answer. It makes sense without ever having to think about any of those other answers again. If it makes such sense it must be true.

I must confess that I have opted for this answer many times. Whenever I take something personally I am opting for this answer. There have been some times when other people intended to take advantage of me. There have been times when people have tried to harm me. And to my shame there have been times when I have used those painful events to play the victim, and wallow in pity, and avoid responsibility for anything I may done wrong, and refuse to try to become a better person.

So yes. Donald Trump does tell the truth about at least one important issue; he tells people that they are not doing as well as they want. But when he says that the reason for this is because they, those bad people, are taking advantage of us, the good people, he is telling a beautiful lie (“There has never been such a beautiful lie”). It is a lie which is way too easy to incorporate as truth.

It is helpful for us to recognize that lie and to acknowledge how deeply it works. And it is important to spend more energy exposing this big lie even if that means spending less energy fact-checking the myriad of smaller lies which the President tells.

But the only way to honestly expose this lie is to first take responsibility for our own lives instead of blaming others for the disappointments we may feel. As it turns out, the question I asked earlier is inadequate because its phrasing tends to avoid responsibility. That can be solved with a slight semantic shift:

Ask not: Am I doing as well as I want?
But perhaps: Am I becoming as good a person as I want to be?