washington
CNN
—
The United States that Donald Trump talks about in his rally speech would be a pretty terrible country if it existed in reality.
Schools are secretly sending children for gender reassignment surgery without their parents’ consent. Even towns and cities conquered by illegal immigrants. Widespread election fraud. Highest inflation ever. Presiding over it all is an illegitimate president who stole the job from the rightful winner.
None of this is true. Mr. Trump continues to tell the nation that it is.
For the third consecutive presidential election, Republican presidential candidates are waging a relentlessly dishonest campaign for the world’s most powerful office. Grossly exaggerating statistics, grossly distorting the records of his opponents and his own, and regularly simply making things up, President Trump has told American voters frequent and varied lies, the only precedent being his own. This is just the election campaign so far.
Trump made thousands of false claims as president, picking up the pace during the crisis and election. But just because he himself has done it before doesn’t make it any less noteworthy that he’s doing it now.
All presidents lie. But historians say no president has ever lied so much, lied about so much and made up so much.
“Donald Trump is the first president to consistently try to create an alternate reality,” said CNN presidential historian Timothy Naftali, a Columbia University researcher and former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library. Ta. Not only do they hide misleading facts and omit harmful information, they endlessly create stories out of thin air.
“He realized that a big lie is more powerful than a small lie. If you’re going to get away with a lie, you might as well tell a big lie,” Naftali said.
Lies on subjects large and small
This fall, Mr. Trump lied about important policy subjects for obvious political reasons, and about minor personal subjects for no apparent reason other than that he has always done so.
He lied about immigration more than anything else.
The unsubstantiated controversial declaration that Haitian immigrants were “eating the pets” of American residents in Ohio was widely reported. But he also said that “Congolese” emptied prisons to send criminals to the United States (which never happened) and that an unspecified number of countries emptied “mental hospitals” for the same reason (also He told a similar imaginary story (no evidence exists). And Vice President Kamala Harris diverted all Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief money to immigrants (which no one, let alone Harris, would do).
President Trump has also consistently lied about the economy. He has repeatedly lied about his signature plan for flat tariffs on imported goods, falsely claiming that tariffs are simply taxes on foreign countries and do not affect Americans. In fact, these costs are paid by U.S. importers, who often pass the costs on to the average U.S. consumer.
And Trump continues his long-term effort to rewrite history. In his speeches, he publicly warned against invading Iraq (which he never did) and never called for locking up his 2016 Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. (which he did) and “never even considered” ending Obamacare (he called for repealing it). candidate and tried to abolish it as president). President Vladimir Putin laughed in Harris’ face when he met with her to try to avert an invasion of Ukraine (Harris has never met Putin). And the 2021 Capitol rioters did not carry guns (though several rioters did).
Lies on such important topics have a political basis. But Trump also continues to tell embarrassing lies about inconsequential topics, not just as president, but as a businessman exaggerating the size of a building and as a television personality in the ratings of his show. It was also a trademark of his rhetoric to exaggerate the situation.
Last month, he spoke about matters as unrelated as his appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s hit TV show, which was not a star-studded final week, but where he won the “Man of the Year” award. did. He claimed he was given eight years in Michigan before running for office, but he never did.
There’s no one else like him
It’s unclear how well these lies actually work for President Trump. While that may help strengthen his loyal base, Trump lost the last election and polls show that more people think he is honest and untrustworthy than others who think he is honest. It definitely turned out to be a lot more than I thought.
What is clear is that no major figure in current U.S. federal politics, Republican or Democratic, lies as often as Trump. That’s certainly not the case with President Joe Biden, Trump’s primary opponent in this election, and Harris, Trump’s current opponent.
Biden has a habit of occasionally ad-libbing lies about his background, particularly that he’s not a former truck driver and that he wasn’t arrested for protesting civil rights, and grossly misrepresenting statistics. be.
Harris is far more cautious than Biden, but she has made false claims about Project 2025, Trump’s economic record and her policy changes on fracking. This is in addition to various controversial predictions about what Trump would do as president if elected.
But when you consider the facts, the two sides in this election are nothing alike.
I’ll have to look carefully at the transcript of Harris’ speech to see if there are one or two inaccurate claims. Trump tends to make dozens of patently false claims in each speech.
In other words, Trump habitually tells more lies in a single public appearance than Harris does in over a month.
Coverage hasn’t changed much.
For years, I have publicly urged the media to make fact-checking political lies a core part of its reporting, rather than a few high-profile nights a year, like CNN does.
Nine years into Trump’s political career, daily fact-checking remains inadequate. While many media outlets have successfully debunked his “pet-eating” nonsense that is too sensational to ignore, too many Trump speeches filled with lies are still being reported in most local and national media outlets. At most, “numerous falsehoods.
If you meet someone at a bar and they tell you 25 things that aren’t true, that’s likely to be one of the first things you say to others about the encounter. President Trump telling the American people 25 untrue things in his rally speech should be one of the first things media outlets tell their readers and viewers about the speech.
President Trump’s negative reaction to fact-checking
Then Mr. Trump will be a little more concerned about being corrected.
Trying to spin fact checkers is the norm in political campaigns. They will argue that the false claim, whether on or off the record, is actually just a little misleading, or just missing a little context, or even that it was true. .
The Trump campaign rarely bothers with this kind of persuasion effort. His White House didn’t either. Instead, his spokespeople have ignored requests for comment and, at times, emailed relevant information that doesn’t even come close to proving his statements.
I suspect the Trump team’s rebuttals will have very low energy because many of his claims are so indefensible. But I also suspect it’s because President Trump doesn’t seem to care much about being told he’s wrong.
He has rarely adjusted his rhetoric to public debunking. No matter what CNN writes, no matter how many “Pinocchio” awards the Washington Post gives him, far more supporters are corrected through social media, pro-Trump media, and much of the mainstream media. He knows he will hear false claims that are not true. Media outlets – rather than hearing the truth.
Occasionally, he demonstrates that he has seen fact-checking himself. Those moments will be revealed.
At a public event in mid-October, President Trump repeated the lie that newly released federal statistics show 13,099 immigrants with murder convictions entered the country “during his administration.” CNN and other outlets have been pointing out for the last two weeks that these numbers refer to people who entered the country over the decades, not just under the Biden and Harris administrations, but also under President Trump’s own administration.
President Trump acknowledged that he was aware of this. “They” quickly said they were trying to say the data covered a “longer” period than just President Biden’s term.
“No,” he declared falsely, without any explanation. Then he repeated his first lie again.
