So, there's actually a few different types here. The pathological liars have to be smart enough to keep their stories straight. Trump isn't, so he's a pathological bullshitter, which makes him trickier to deal with.

The bullshitters are the carnival barkers. They make great talk radio hosts as long as they have a good call screener. These people are usually having one-way conversations with friendly crowds, and limit their one-on-one dialogs to sympathetic ears. They say whatever they want because they can expect not to be called out on it. Once in a while Trump gets the itch to prove himself in front of real journalists (without an audience) and it never goes well. He can't handle the confrontation and generally looks like a fool.

People like Atlas are different. They're the contrarians. The people so convinced they're right when everyone else in their knowledge field disagrees with them – in fact, even moreso *because* everyone disagrees with them. They have a chip on their shoulder and think they're the Albert Einstein of their field – because they think other physicists thought Einstein was crazy (they didn't). They believe what they're saying, though.

As far as the manipulation goes, I hate to say this, but I think most of us would probably be better at it than we'd like to believe, if we really felt we needed to. Just think about all of the thoughts and impulses we suppress, the little white lies we tell in order to maintain a general aura of civility. And it all requires people skills: the ability to read a room, to understand what motivates people, what triggers them, what they respond well to, etc. Which is fine.

But if you abandon honestly as a general virtue, you lose a sense of guilt and shame about being deceptive, and you can use those skills for outright manipulation. That's why people say Trump's superpower is his shamelessness – that's the difference between persuading and manipulating. Any politician could do what he does if they lacked a conscience. Most of us could, I imagine.