Several political commentators have tried to make sense out of how it is possible for someone who provably and objectively lies with the consistency, frequency, and vigor that Trump does is so often heralded as his supporters as "being honest" or "genuine" or "keeping it real."
The best explanation for this is that "being honest" and all those other ways of phrasing it are actually trying to say I think is what many of them are trying to say is something slightly but importantly different.
Listen to any mainstream politician talk. Do you ever within a rounding error hear a politician speak in a public setting that wasn't the most inhuman, inauthentic, sound-bite ready, pre-prepared statement ever? A politician can't say hello to a baby without you just hearing the dozen of focus groups it was run through, the edges sanded off by multiple speech writers, the tone and context sifted through again and again.
And when they are done and finally speaking it sounds good, it sounds right, it sounds correct, it sounds beautiful, hell it even sounds honest for certain meanings of honest. What it doesn't sound like is authentic. Human. Off-the-cuff. Unprepared. Unfiltered.
When you work that hard to make sure you saying something the "right way" it never feel natural.
And I do think on some level people have been desperate for this authenticity. Politicians, even the ones we like, have felt so fake and phony for so long that when someone came along with LITERALLY NO FILTER people did gravitate to him.
