In the normal world, once you hitch yourself to a single implausible claim, you're bound by circumstance to try to keep it in line with reality, by making a series of supporting claims that inevitably build on weaker and weaker ground.
One of the problems honest people have understanding habitual liars is that they think liars are always incentivised to try to keep their lies plausible within a world of shared truth -- that they will always ultimately be caught out.
Hence the idea that the coverup is always worse than the crime. Everyone thinks the domino run of implausible claims ends with the liar being caught out when one lie does not move things on for the liar.
But in systems of power, in fact, there comes a point where it doesn't really matter whether something you're saying is true, it just matters that you say enough things that people get caught up trying to make them make sense and are distracted from what you are doing.
The dominos just keep falling forever.
This isn't new at all: one of the most influential men in Russian politics, Vladislav Surkov, absolutely learned to weaponise theatrical untruth in this way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladislav_Surkov
And there have long been fears that Surkov's techniques were infecting the West (through Hungary, Turkey etc.)
The problem is people simply don't want to believe, at any deep level, that these people lie for the sake of it, when in fact they clearly do. And they get caught up on the idea that since decent people think being caught lying is shameful, liars will always feel shame when caught out.
Once you understand that they do not, you can understand that any given lie may not be told to hide a specific misdeed; it may simply be told to add to the haze of untruth that allows the liar to go about their business.