Roughly Speaking

Trompe l’oeil is a French phrase meaning "a trick of the eye," or to "deceive the eye." It’s a style of painting in which objects are depicted with realistic detail and look deceivingly three dimensional — as if you could walk or drive right through them. Pardon our French, but the new term in American politics might very well be Trump L’oeil — that is, the unartful deceits of the president, his sons, his staff and his apologists. In Trump L’oeil, up is down and down is up, a man looks presidential only because he’s standing next to men and women who actually do. In Trump L’oeil, a meeting between the President’s son and a Russian lawyer was about international adoptions, not about getting political dirt on your political opponent from a foreign adversary. Trump L’oeil employs false equivalents, as if getting debate questions in advance compares with actually going to a meeting with a Russian tied to the Kremlin, knowing the Kremlin was trying to skew the U.S. election. In Trump L’oeil, a 36 percent approval