Bullshitting covers a lot of what salesmen, promoters and hustlers like Trump do — with fair amounts of self-excusing and blame-shifting, whenever the need arises — and I’d argue it’s his normal way of operating, as a candidate or not. He switches to gaslighting when the heat is really on, as he did in the examples cited above.

In one sense, the two are quite similar. Both the bullshitter and the gaslighter can use both facts and lies, especially by playing them off each other and insisting that both have equal value. But the techniques differ in at least two crucial ways: First, bullshitting reflects a fundamental carelessness, while the gaslighter is very careful in crafting their deception. Second, bullshitting may serve any number of ends, while gaslighting is specifically intended to undermine the victim or target’s sense of reality and their trust in their own perceptions and sanity. With her detailed unmasking of Trump’s gaslighting, McElrath provides a concrete framework by which his other deceptions can be measured: The specificity of her analysis gives us a good model for viewing Trump more critically in other settings.

The second way past the impasse of what to do about Trump’s constant lying was to grapple with his behavior as a whole. At some point we began hearing people, including “Art of the Deal” ghostwriter Tony Schwartz, refer to Trump as a sociopath or psychopath. But psychologists and psychiatrists can’t say things like that, at least not in public. Under the American Psychiatric Association’s “Goldwater Rule,” shrinks are ethically barred from offering opinions about people they have not personally examined, arguably for very good reasons.

As McElrath shows, other possibilities are available. One doesn’t have to treat a psychopath, malignant narcissist or otherwise disturbed individual to develop expertise in recognizing and dealing with them. In the realm of sexual abusers alone, there are vast networks of people, organizations and institutions with decades of experience in responding to the damage they do — support groups, women’s shelters, therapists, prosecutors, specialized law enforcement units and so on. Many people in these networks have similar experiences with the damage done by similarly disturbed people.

This network has many different aspects, but its common thread is that of caring — a connected concern with the welfare of others. This stands in stark contrast with the journalistic “view from nowhere” and the canons of disembodied, disinterested objectivity from which it derives. In fact, the myth of objectivity tends to obscure the fact that all knowledge is arrived at by way of subjective experience, and is always subject to further revision. Manipulators like Trump are experts at exploiting how the mythology of objectivity can help shield them from the truth.

McElrath’s analysis was exemplary, but she does not stand alone. She represents an entire realm of insight, analysis and understanding that America’s mainstream press has almost deliberately avoided, even though we have badly needed it since at least the first Fox News primary debate, when Megyn Kelly asked Trump about his record of misogynistic verbal attacks and he gaslighted her extensively in response.

In fact we needed that kind of insight an entire election cycle earlier, when Trump flirted with running against Barack Obama in 2012 and pursued elaborate “birther” theories about the president’s eligibility for office. In both cases, crucially relevant expert knowledge — derived from survivors’ experience, testimony, history and point of view — was either ignored or treated as subjective opinion, in need of “balance.”

It’s important to remember the larger context that never quite registered in the mainstream media: Trump did not simply question Obama’s birth certificate, he questioned virtually everything about him. He said that Obama “came out of nowhere,” and that “the people that went to school with him, they never saw him, they don’t know who he is. It’s crazy.” These wild, unfocused claims were thoroughly debunked, without damaging Trump’s popularity or credibility. Even after Obama released his long-form birth certificate — which Trump at first declined to take at face value — the real estate tycoon continued to demand the president’s college applications, transcripts and passport records. For reasons never made explicit, a private citizen repeatedly insisted that the duly elected president of the United States present all his identifying paperwork to him.

As many African-Americans and others have observed, that situation was both insulting and profoundly racist: A white man with no official position demanding a black man’s papers, as if he had an inherent right to do so. This perception was surely informed by black people’s subjective experience, both individually and collectively, as well as their understanding of history. But the perception that Trump’s conduct was unacceptable was not “just an opinion.” It reflected a centuries-long, multi-continent practice by which white men, regardless of their social station, could demand that black men justify their presence and existence, on the basis of documents issued by white rulers.

So the “black perspective” on the historically racist meaning and significance of Trump’s birtherism was more than just some people’s opinion. It was a historical insight, available to any and all who have a desire to know the truth. Trump’s racism is as objectively indisputable as his misogyny is. The fact that the insight into objective truth comes most clearly from people who care about the damage it does is not a disqualification. To the contrary, it is a warning that disregarding knowledge that comes from caring impoverishes our grasp of the real world. This is even more true when the subjects of caring are those who have traditionally been marginalized, ignored or dehumanized.

The conventions of “he said, she said” media discourse are meant to ensure fairness, but can crowd out real-world truth. Experts exist only to be “balanced” by other experts. Exxon and its buddies have used this ploy to delay action on global warming for decades, when an ethics of care would have long ago required planetary life-saving action. It’s not that the tiny faction of climate-denial voices should be ignored or censored. But the real-world consequences (and probabilities) of each side being right or wrong should be weighed in the balance, beyond the reach of the bullshitters and gaslighters.

What we care about matters — not just in shaping who we are as individuals but in shaping the world we will share in the future. An aberrant personality like Trump cares nothing about other people or the world — very likely he cannot help it, and is beyond our help. But a free press that justifies itself as protecting and securing a free society should be capable of understanding the role of caring in guiding us toward a fuller grasp of the truth, and a better service to our common destiny. Journalism urgently needs to reform itself, in other words, and Leah McElrath has offered us an important lesson.