For a candidate whose campaign is based entirely on surface impressions, Kamala Harris managed to make a terrible one on Thursday night — even to her biggest cheerleaders.

The Democratic nominee for president, a woman who has never received a single vote outside the state of California in any election, took the stage for the keynote address of the Democratic National Convention at Chicago’s United Center.

And amid faking friendship with her audience of the faithful, she managed to spit out lies so blatant even the “fact-checkers” of the establishment media couldn’t ignore them.

From former President Donald Trump’s stance on abortion to foreign policy to tariffs and taxation, Harris reeled off a series of falsehoods about her Republican opponent, analysis by even reliably liberal news outlets like The Washington Post, The New York Times and USA Today noted.

And while they didn’t speculate on Harris’ potential motivation, even an American with the mental capacity of Joe Biden could figure it out: To give the viewers a deliberately distorted view of Trump’s plans.

As USA Today pointed out, Harris lied about an alleged Trump plan to establish a national “anti-abortion coordinator.”

The outlet noted Harris was distorting an idea put forward by the conservative Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” a Democratic bugaboo Trump hasn’t at all endorsed.

At The Washington Post, “fact checker” Glenn Kessler (who’s too often too willing to go easy when it comes to the Biden-Harris administration) also found Harris had strayed from the truth describing Trump’s vision for NATO, Russian aggression and the impact of the Trump tax cuts of 2017.

The bit about dealing with Russia was particularly egregious, since she claimed Trump “encouraged” Russian President Vladimir Putin to “invade our allies.”

Trump never encouraged Putin to “invade” any country. And there are plenty of Americans old enough to remember that Putin did not, in fact, invade anyone while Trump was president. It was actually Joe Biden who “encouraged” Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Trump wants the country’s quasi-socialist European allies to pay their fair share for a defense now being shouldered largely by the American taxpayer — only Democrats would have a problem with that idea.

Harris, of course, wasn’t the only Democratic liar taking the stage in Chicago.

The New York Times — again, no hot-bed of conservative thinking — managed to put together a list of other Democratic speakers at the convention with their own lies about Trump’s past.

What’s important here isn’t so much that Harris lied about Trump. Democrats and their establishment media allies have been doing that since he announced for the presidency in 2015.

What matters is that, for a change, some outlets have broken from their Praetorian guard posture when it comes to Harris and publicized, if only temporarily, exactly how deceptive her campaign actually is.

Harris is a cut-out candidate — a cardboard concoction whose attraction is based solely on the impression she makes in contrast to the feeble meanderings of the octogenarian Biden. (Even that low bar is apparently too high sometimes.)

After almost four utterly unimpressive years as vice president, Harris had been given a chance to re-introduce herself to the American public by a mainstream media almost entirely devoted to defeating Trump in November.

In other words, she got a chance to make a second first impression on American voters.

But on Thursday night, not even her supporters in the establishment media were entirely buying it.

American voters in November should know better, too.

Story Editor