We would not be in this cluster fuck if ~63M people weren’t perfectly fine with having a pathological liar as POTUS. Trump is no Svengali. People who voted for him know he’s corrupt, ignorant and incompetent and they don’t care because their self-interests are being served by the fact that Trump willfully undermines the very institutions that they despise. That is where the blame lies. Without his supporters, Trump would remain a Correspondence Dinner joke punchline.
That’s when everybody in the conference call is also having a bite, right ? 
I’m not fully up on my history here but I would regard Roosevelt’s behind-the-scenes actions as more akin to state secrets than simple blatant lying. There was an inconsistency between his administration’s stated policy on isolationism and his secret actions to prepare for possible war. But I’ll revise my comment to say “… the whole principle of governance becomes perverted to the service of dishonest self-interest or (usually) dishonest support for ideological mythologies rather than fact”.
I would also argue that there’s no comparison between Trump and the other presidents you named. As a pathological liar Trump is in a class by himself. Virtually everything he says is either a lie or in some way misleading. Absolutely nothing he says can be trusted – and most of it is self-serving – and that alone makes him unfit for the office.
The effects of his lying are easily mitigated, simply disbelieve every word that comes out of his pie hole. The only people who believe what the president says at this point are his base, and for the most part he’s just repeating lies that they would have heard from other sources and believed even if he hadn’t said them. Using the weight and force of the United States government to force another government to take actions on your personal behalf is an order of magnitude and not so easily ignored. If Ukraine had started an investigation of Biden, and I had no suspicion that they did so at the behest of Trump, I would have been concerned about Biden’s honesty.
Slightly off topic, I think there is actually too much emphasis on the “Quid Pro Quo” aspect of the Ukraine scandal. Although the holding back of the aid has national security implications that make the matter particularly bad; in terms of corruption and abuse of power, it would have been just as bad if the president made the request he made even without holding the aid in the balance. The good will of the president of the United States in and of itself is a thing of value. If you are a small country who is in the US sphere of influence, and the president says jump, he doesn’t need to tell you what will happen if you don’t jump, you’ll still answer “how high?”.
The reason for that is that Trump is actually not a liar. More often than not he’s a bullshitter. A liar knows the truth, a and cares about it, at least needs to take it into consideration in their attempt to hide or distort it.
A bullshitter doesn’t necessarily know, or even care, what the truth is and the truth content of his speech isn’t the point - all that matters is whether or not the listener is convinced.
For an extremely salient example of this, consider that time Trump vociferously claimed on the campaign trail that, Thanks Obama! :
Can you believe that ?!
Of course you can’t believe it. It’s absolutely impossible, by definition, for a country that has living people in it to have a negative GDP ; as even a country where every last human is dead only has a GDP of zero. But he said it anyway. I don’t think the knew the actual GDP when he made that statement. I’m not even sure he knows what GDP really is. Even if you accept the generous idea that he merely misspoke and meant GDP growth, it was still factually wrong and in that case then yes, everyone has heard of a country that has negative GDP growth because it happens everywhere punctually and is only indicative of a recession when it keeps happening.
But that doesn’t matter, none of it. The only thing that mattered was conveying the general idea that “country in bad shape, Left to blame” while the specifics are utterly irrelevant to this bellyfelt notion. And since his supporters share this bellyfeel (or opportunistlcally like where that bellyfeel is going), they don’t really care that his actual speech based on it is gobbledigook either.
Ok. So would you trust Trump to clean your bathroom?
No, because he would claim to have used the best chemicals but in reality he would probably use just water and clean the toilet with the same brush used to clean the faucet handles. With no antiseptic in between.
Would you trust Trump to run your fast food restaurant you are a franchise owner of? No. He would skim from the til, lie about doing maintenance, serve expired food, or just lie about even reading the franchise operating manuals. (A set of books that explain how to operate a specific chain restraunt)
Would you trust him as CEO of a bank you have money invested in?
Then why the fuck do you trust him as CEO of a trillion dollar institution that has nuclear weapons and is responsible for the care of millions of elderly people?!
This bullshitting and incompetence should be enough to have him removed. It should not require an outright crime - a bullshitter does not have the best interests of the organization they lead. Sheer incompetence is at least as bad as taking for personal gain.
…
I don’t think one rules out the other. Sometimes Trump lies. Sometimes he bullshits. Sometimes he makes stuff up. Sometimes he prevaricates. Sometimes he misleads. Sometimes he deceives. And if we can get him to testify under oath, I’m sure he’ll perjure. Trump is capable of running the whole spectrum of dishonesty.
I’d personaly count my fingers afterwards if I ever shook his hand, but that’s not the point 
I was merely endeavouring to explain why he was so often telling such colossal, self-evident whoppers.
Tru dat. But I think that, since his business model and image and so on have been so very much based on appearances, bluster and, well, bullshit (or gilt, to use an appropriate metaphor) for so long, he has achieved better skills at (or a better intuition of) bullshitting than lying.
Qui custodiet ipsos custodes?
The problem is that if you give someone other than the voters the power to regulate the speech of elected representatives, it’s very easy for that power to turn into the ability of whichever body you’ve given it to to subvert democracy itself.
Politicians are often full of shit. Trump is considerably more overfull than any in recent memory. But the way to fix that problem is by voting for someone else.
But there does exist a system of checks and balances, within which is the ability of Congress to impeach the president. I think it can be argued that “persistently and systematically misleading the American people” – where it can be objectively shown that thousands of things he has said about important issues were flat-out wrong, and mostly self-serving – should be grounds for impeachment. Clinton was impeached for one lie, albeit it was under oath; Trump has habitually and persistently uttered thousands of them, including denying wrongdoing and obstruction of justice where those things clearly occurred.
Trying to take Trump on lying would be amazingly difficult.
You would, in essence, be litigating reality when half the country has opted to trust the reality presented by the President, which is that everyone in the media and in his own government is promoting lies in a giant conspiracy to undermine him and continue promoting a Liberal agenda.
When that is the lie, what can you bring to prove that it’s false to the people who believe that it’s true?
Counterpoint: Trump did the same shit before he was elected President, so it’s not like the voters didn’t already have that information. And I think that there should be a vast legal gulf between penalties for lying under oath (very illegal) and being full of shit all the time (bad, but not illegal).
I appreciate that Congress did not try to impeach him for generally being full of shit at every turn, but for specific criminal things like bribery and abuse of office.
I agree it would be difficult. You would have to pick out the statements that are a slam-dunk in terms of total falsehoods – no ambiguity about it – and show the hard evidence that it was wrong from creditable sources such as science journals or the consensus of mainstream news reports.
You realize that if you’re right, and a significant proportion of the population wouldn’t believe it, then there’s no hope for this country? It becomes driven by superstition and delusion instead of evidence-based fact. I sure hope it hasn’t come to that. But Trump’s attempts at discrediting the mainstream media in favor of his own fabrications are one of the worst things he’s done in moving things in that direction.
Perhaps it was wise to keep it simple. I’m just saying that governing through constant lies is incredibly damaging to democracy. It’s the methodology of dictatorships. The Soviet Union did it all the time, and the Nazis were specialists at it. And now the US is doing it. How scary is that?
The only difference is that a free press still exists, but it’s been so discredited among Trumpists that it has virtually no effect. Hence his approval rating remains remarkably constant no matter what he does, and no matter what happens in the news.
It’s “OK” because his hard core followers really don’t care what he says and does as long as he represents their 1950’s pre-civil rights-a woman belongs in the kitchen-white supremacy beliefs. After almost 3 years, there can’t be any doubt in regards to who and what he really is, so the same can be said of those who still ardently support him. That’s why, at this point, I damn them out of hand and have ended friendships because of it.
Just today:
Depending on how they decide Democrat and Republican, that 40%" could be 40% of the country or about 13%.
Based on polls of support for the President, they may have taken a broader view of political leaning than strict party registration.
We did vote for somebody else. They made Trump President anyway.
It’s not that a quid pro quo isn’t OK - it’s that this particular one isn’t OK. There would have been nothing wrong if Trump had threatened to withhold that aid unless Ukraine did something that was in the US national interest. But that’s not what he did - what he did was threaten to withhold that aid unless Ukraine did something that was in his personal interest. That’s really where the wrongness lies, and why it’s so hard to put a name to what’s wrong.
Or put another way, he was trying to force the Ukraine to bribe him. (And apparently would have succeeded too, if it weren’t for those crazy kids.) And bribery being one of the four explicit impeachable things, well…