As the old joke goes: “How can you tell when Trump is lying?” “Check to see if his lips are moving.”
That’s how, during his four years as President, Trump racked up over 30,500 “false or misleading claims.” As time passed, Trump undoubtedly noticed that lying seemed to be a successful strategy. Rather than costing him a political price, they were solidifying and intensifying his base. That’s why, over time, the frequency of his lies substantially increased: “Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in this third year — and 39 claims a day in his final year.”
So, it should come has no surprise that Trump continues to craft new lies on a daily basis as he blusters his way through the 2024 campaign. If anything has changed over time, it is the sheer brazenness of the fabrications. In the past, there would usually be an attempt to cloak a lie in a veneer, however thin, of plausibility. For example, when Trump falsely claimed that he “created the greatest U.S. economy in U.S. history,” it took a bit of work to fact check that. Trump still makes these claims, of course. But now they are getting crowded out by falsehoods that are so easily disproved, he might as well be asserting that the sun rises in the west. And he is taking lies he has repeated numerous times and escalating them to new levels of absurdity:
• Not satisfied with his ”big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen — he is now trying to gaslight voters into believing that he actually won (not just should have won). For example, while speaking in Wisconsin, Trump told the crowd at a rally: “You know we won this state. We won this state by a lot. It came out that we won this.” Quick fact check: He lost Wisconsin in 2020. Nothing has changed since then.
• No longer content with false claims that the authorized search executed at Mar-a-Lago was an illegal “raid” — Trump is now claiming that the FBI, on Biden’s orders, was there to assassinate him: “Biden’s DOJ was authorized to shoot me! it’s just been revealed that Biden’s DOJ was authorized to use deadly force for their despicable raid in Mar-a-Lago. You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable … Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.”
Of course, the opposite was true: On the day of the search, Trump was out of the state. And agents alerted Trump’s lawyers and the Secret Service in advance of their arrival.
• Remember Trump’s first impeachment? And his description of the incriminating phone conversation with Zelensky as “the perfect phone call”? Apparently, that’s no longer a sufficient lie. Trump now tells “an entirely fictional story about how there was a supposed tape of the 2019 phone call.” In this fantasy, the recording proves that the Democrats made up the contents of the call. As Trump puts it: “They didn’t know that phone call was taped…and they got caught.”
Spoiler alert: No tape of Trump’s call with Zelensky was ever released. In fact, there is no known recording of the conversation. What we do know is based on notes taken during the call. And the notes confirm what was detailed in the impeachment hearings. No Democrat was “caught” doing anything…because there was nothing to catch. Trump is just making it all up.
[To hear Trump’s fabrication, listen to this audio clip, from a recent episode of This American Life, featuring Ira Glass interviewing Alexander Vindman.]
• Trump’s sycophants are now following his new roadmap. For example, Kellyanne Conway recently praised Trump’s appearance at a Black church in Detroit — touting that 8,000 people were in attendance. In fact, “the space had, at most, room for a few hundred people and many pews remained empty during the speech.” The kicker: At least half the people there were white. Is there any chance that Conway was unaware of this? Zero.
Why do Trump and company continue to make up stuff? The Atlantic offers this depressingly obvious answer: “In the end, the Trump campaign has chosen the path of deception both because the weaknesses of its candidate demand it and because it’s a more reliable path to better media coverage and to winning over credulous and inattentive voters. Why bother telling the truth if lying works so well?”
Yup. In a sane world, such lies would not be tolerated by the broader electorate of this country. Not only would they be rejected but they would provide ample cause to reject the candidate who was promulgating them. Not so with Trump and his MAGA supporters — and potentially with voters who aren’t informed or engaged.
As explained in another superb Atlantic article, Trump supporters use “motivated ignorance” to maintain the fiction that Trump’s crazy assertions are actually valid: “People can be personally upstanding and still be wrong on politics. But the lies that MAGA world parrots are so manifestly untrue, and the Trump ethic is so manifestly cruel, that they are difficult to set aside. If a person insists, despite the overwhelming evidence, that Trump was the target of an assassination plot hatched by Biden and carried out by the FBI, this is more than an intellectual failure; it is a moral failure, and a serious one at that. It’s only reasonable to conclude that such Trump supporters have not made a good-faith effort to understand what is really and truly happening.”
This is a major problem…and perhaps the single biggest reason that Trump still remains a threat to win the Presidency in November. As Robert Reich explains: “If voters come to believe that the people who rioted at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, were ‘true patriots’ who have been unfairly prosecuted, how can anyone maintain faith in our system of justice? These are not small lies. They are not political hyperbole. They are lies that cut to the core of our entire system of self-government. They undermine belief in our democracy and system of justice. It is one thing for Donald Trump — a pathological liar and sociopath — to conjure up these lies. He is nuts. But for an entire political party to wittingly repeat these lies amounts to organized treason.”
What should we do?
While, on the one hand, we remain in danger of being buried by Trump’s avalanche of lies, we too often tolerate these falsehoods as “normal for Trump.” As such, they no longer make headlines nor spark our outrage. Some on the left have even suggested that we should ignore these lies — as calling attention to them only provides oxygen to fuel their growth.
Respectfully, we disagree. We need to keep calling attention to the lies (as we continue to do here in these posts) — even given the risks from repeating them. And we need to convince people — those who are still reachable — that it is unacceptable to vote for anyone who shows such disregard for the truth. Otherwise, if we remove an insistence on some minimal level of truthfulness in our political discourse, if we set the bar so low that politicians no longer need to behave as if facts matter, then we have already lost what we are fighting to save.
