It was no small irony that the day before the release of the special House Committee on Benghazi, Hillary Clinton directly addressed the question of why voters don’t trust her. Speaking in Chicago on Monday, in a rare moment of introspective candor, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee said, “I personally know I have work to do on this front.” To understand that a problem exists is the first step toward solving it. But no sooner had those words passed her lips then the former secretary of state reverted to her usual pattern of deflecting blame for her own missteps on others. While she admitted that she “had make mistakes,” Clinton insisted that the source of her problems was“25 years worth of wild accusations.” In Hillary’s world, she is always more sinned against than having sinned no matter how many lies she tells.

As our Noah Rothman noted yesterday, that approach summed up the response of Democrats to the voluminous Benghazi report issued by House Republicans. Just as Clinton has always put down any criticism of her conduct as being carried out by a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” the assumption on the part of those who are supporting her candidacy is that such denials will suffice to motivate a largely tame media to “move on” — another trademark Clinton phrase — from any examination of the tragic events of 9/11/12 and its aftermath.

Given the polarized nature of contemporary politics, such expectations are probably not unrealistic. Taking a closer look at what our John Podhoretz accurately described in his New York Post column as the lies that have been “standard operating procedure” in the Obama administration has never been something Democrats were willing to do. The bifurcated media and political culture we now live with has created two totally separate audiences that don’t read, listen to, or watch the same media outlets, let alone view events from the same perspective. That means the country is largely divided between conservatives/Republicans who think of Benghazi as a scandal that illustrates the irresponsibility and lies of both Obama and Clinton and liberals/Democrats who view the entire subject as a partisan red herring.

That split has now evolved into a stark choice between the deeply unpopular and distrusted Clinton and Donald Trump, a figure whose unfavorability dwarfs that of the former First Lady. That’s why the Clinton camp’s assumption that they can simply ignore the Benghazi findings with impunity is not unreasonable. With Democrats simply putting their fingers in their ears at the mere mention of Benghazi and many others so disgusted by Trump’s statements and problems with the truth that they are willing to ignore her obvious shortcomings, why should anything we’ve learned as a result of this investigation affect the presidential election?

But if Clinton truly understands that she has a trust problem, she should stop talking about the “wild accusations” and admit that the “mistakes” she has made are product of her problem with telling the truth, not having sometimes made difficult decisions that proved to be wrong.

The fact is the Benghazi findings are not about wild conspiracy theories or accusations that Clinton deliberately sought to leave the Americans in Benghazi to die. The “work” she has to do involves explaining why she would publicly blame the Benghazi attack on a reaction to a video, and then email her daughter that it was the action of an al Qaeda-like terrorist group, and then tell the public the next morning that she didn’t know who did it.

Clinton famously asked “what difference does it make” when pressed about her conflicting stories by a Senate committee. But the answer is that when you lie about breaking laws by operating a home server that allowed her to evade rules about transparency — something we only learned about because of the House investigation — your credibility is shot.

The comparison with Trump may cover a multitude of shortcomings on Clinton’s part, but even her supporters are aware that her stories about the emails, the conflicts of interest that arose from her family foundation that operated as a political slush fund and, yes, Benghazi are only problems because she can’t seem to tell the truth about any of it.

Despite all of the electoral advantages that belong to the Democrats this year, Clinton may think all she has to do to win in November is sit back and let Trump continue to hang himself. But if Trump has any chance of beating her it is precisely because the lies she has told were so blatant that the only way for Democrats to deal with them is to simply tell us to “move on” and talk about something else. That is not a formula for recovering trust. It is, at best, a warning that her potential presidency would be burdened by a crippling credibility gap even before it began. It may be unreasonable to think it is even possible for her to start coming clean about this problem during an election. But unless Clinton does more than pay lip service to the deep distrust the American public feels about her, this problem will only grow and fester once she is no longer matched up against Trump.