Magician Penn Jillette Reveals Which Candidate Lies The Least

Penn Jillette (photo by Michael Willems [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons)

The great and magical Penn Jillette doesn’t have a god. Neither do a lot of other people, many of whom will join Jillette in a mass gathering of atheists on the National Mall in Washington, DC this weekend. (It’s called the Reason Rally.) Jillette thinks the gathering should really be even bigger. Because he doesn’t think some people who profess to believe in God are telling the truth. Two people in particular that Jillette thinks are stretching the truth when it comes to professing their faith are Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Trump and Clinton pay lip service to religion “even if many on either side of religion don’t believe them or want to claim them,” Jillette writes in an editorial for CNN.

Jillette isn’t surprised that Clinton and Trump engage in what he thinks is, at the least, religious hyperbole. Why would this be the only thing either one of them would tell the truth about?, he asks. But it remains common wisdom — whether true or not — that a profession of religious belief is necessary to be elected president. Jillette identifies the one presidential candidate who “never seems to mention god” — that’s Libertarian candidate and former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson. He’s also the candidate, Jillette says, with the “least amount of experience lying.”