Anthony Scaramucci Defends Trump's Constant Deception - Because It's Not 'Absolute Lying'

President Donald Trump's former communications director Anthony Scaramucci on MSNBC Friday evening defended the president's frequent and excessive lying by saying he simply has a unique "communication style." Trump's tendency to embellish, Scaramucci argued, is not the same as the "absolute lying" that the media accuses him of.

The topic came up on the show "The Beat," when filmmaker Rob Reiner asked Scaramucci why Trump "lies all the time." 

"There's different shades of that," Scaramucci said. "He is an embellisher of stories, he is a macro-wave surfer, if you will. And so he will tell a big tale and a big story, and so now the media is conflating that with absolute lying."

Scaramucci didn't explain what "absolute lying" is. But Trump does demonstrably lie all the time and has done so in public for years. He has even written about how lying is a strategy to get what he wants.

Scaramucci continued: "Sometimes you let a story get embellished and the facts go a little bit away from the story, that's what the president has done."

But Trump doesn't just lie about the little things, or round up numbers to puff up arguments for his own views — though he does do that. He lied about knowing about a hush money payment to the porn star who says she slept with the president, which relates to a serious legal case against him. He lied when he said he was going to sue all the women who have made sexual misconduct claims against him. And when he was sued for defrauding the "students" of Trump University — a criminal form of lying — he eventually settled the case for $25 million.

These are just a few examples — there are countless others, of varying levels of seriousness, as outlets like the Washington Post have tirelessly documented. Scaramucci's defense of this unending torrent of deception as mere "embellishment" is as ridiculous as Kellyanne Conway's appeal to "alternative facts."

Watch the clip below: