Donald Trump is probably the closest there is a toddler in terms of lying

Donald Trump is probably the closest there is a toddler in terms of lying. So far he has made more than 800 false or misleading claims, writes Colm O’Regan

The eldest has started lying. She’s not even two. Toddler lies are the tiniest of lies, not big ones like the ones we tell ourselves about the point of it all and where our career is going. They are funny lies because they can so easily be disproved and don’t appear to gain any advantage.

“Did you go to the playground today with Mammy?”

“No”.

“But your mother has just told me you were both at the playground. I have been shown a photo of you looking ‘adorbs’ and it’s timestamped with today’s date. I’m asking you, under oath, did you go to the playground?”

Still the answer is no.

They are just simple denials of fact with no ulterior motive. I assume it’s just for the sake of it and not that she has found conclusive proof that we are all in a giant alien simulation and therefore nothing is objectively true or a fact any more. I’m sure we’ve all feared that our first child might actually be a tiny technician sent here to debug.

Assuming that is not the case and she’s just lying for lying’s sake, usually we can undo the lie through a bit of semantics. “Did you go to no playground today?” “No”.

It goes without saying the temptation is there to film it in the hope that it will go viral. She’s nearly two now and hasn’t gone viral yet so we’re a little concerned. But most parenting advice suggests we should deal with something privately using ‘parenting’ rather than film it in the hope of fleeting fame. Experts eh?

Toddlers lie because at that age because they can’t differentiate between reality and fantasy. They don’t understand the idea of an objective truth based in fact. One way to deal with it just to remind them what really happened, rather than coming down hard on the lie.

It’s easy to do that at this stage because usually there’s a witness to corroborate. It’ll be harder as they get older, when it’ll be one child’s word against the other and you’ll have to do DNA testing to see who hit who.

In public life, Donald Trump is probably the closest there is a toddler in terms of lying. So far according to the Washington Post, he has made more than 800 false or misleading claims. Some are, no doubt, about self-preservation as the net closes in on links to Russian mob money and possibly being bribed by China to spike a trade deal. But it’s the others that are the most toddler-like, ones that are pointless and easily disproven — like how many people attended his inauguration — that seem puzzling. But even his egregious lies serve a purpose. They tie up our brains and distract.

On this side of the water, we’re still relatively conservative - phnar - when it comes to lying, more like older children. The lies take a while to come out and cannot necessarily be caught definitively. One exception might be “Everything The Pro-Brexit Campaign Told People”. This came as a shock because we expected the Tory Right to be duplicitous but just thought they’d be better at it.

In Irish public life, the juiciest lies seems to emerge at tribunals because they are paid by the hour so everyone has the time to find out the truth. The rest of the time, lying is couched in terms that reduced its dirty, rotten, pants-on-fire impact: “To the best of my recollection”, “I was not aware”, “I may have misspoke” or “Of course the IMF is not in town”.

So there’s no big deal with toddler lies. It’s when she starts saying “I can’t comment at this stage” and “I don’t want to prejudice the outcome of an inquiry” or gets her baby sister to issue a statement that I’ll need to worry.