Analysis: Donald Trump's campaign of incessant lies

Washington CNN —

The United States that Donald Trump describes in his rally speeches would be pretty bad if it actually existed.

Schools are secretly sending children for gender-affirming surgeries without parental consent. Towns and even cities conquered by illegal immigrants. Widespread electoral fraud. Highest inflation ever. Who presides over everything: an illegitimate president who stole the position from the legitimate winner.

None of this is true. Trump keeps telling his crowds that this is the case.

For the third consecutive presidential election, the Republican presidential candidate is waging a relentlessly dishonest campaign for the most powerful office in the world. Wildly exaggerating statistics, grossly distorting his opponents' records and his own, regularly making things up altogether, Trump lies to American voters with a frequency and variety for which the only precedent is his own previous campaigns.

Trump has made thousands of false claims as president, picking up the pace during crises and elections. But the fact that he himself has done the same thing before doesn't make it any less remarkable that he's doing it now.

All presidents lie. Historians say, however, that there has never been a president who lied so much, who lied about so many different things, or who invented so many things out of whole cloth.

Donald Trump is the first president to consistently seek to create a separate reality, said Timothy Naftali, CNN presidential historian, research scholar at Columbia University and former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, not only by shading the facts of misleading manner or omitting damaging information, but constantly making up stories out of thin air.

He discovered, Naftali says, that the big lie is more powerful than the little lie, and if you're going to get away with a lie, you might as well go for the big lie.

Lies on matters big and small

This fall, Trump lied both on important political issues for obvious political reasons and on trivial personal matters for no apparent reason other than that it's what he's always done.

He lied about immigration more than anything else.

His baseless claim that Haitian migrants are eating the pets of American residents in an Ohio town received widespread media coverage. But he told equally imaginary stories about the Congo emptying its prisons to send criminals to the United States (this did not happen), other unspecified countries emptying their insane asylums for the same reason (none proof of that either), and Vice President Kamala Harris diverting all money from federal emergency management authorities for migrant disaster relief (no one has done this, least of all Harris herself) .

Trump has also been consistently misleading about the economy. He has repeatedly lied about his flagship proposal for across-the-board tariffs on imported goods, falsely claiming that the tariffs are just a tax on foreign countries and do not affect Americans. They are actually paid by U.S. importers, who often pass the costs on to the average American consumer.

And Trump continues his long-term effort to rewrite history. In his account, he publicly warned against invading Iraq (he didn't), never called for locking up 2016 Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton (he did) , and never even thought about ending Obamacare (he called for it to be repealed as a candidate and tried to end Obamacare). to repeal it as president); Vladimir Putin mocked Harris when she met with him to try to avert the invasion of Ukraine (Harris never met Putin); and no Capitol rioters in 2021 were armed with a gun (several rioters carried weapons).

There is a political justification for lies on such important issues. But Trump also made mind-boggling lies about trivial matters that were a hallmark of his rhetoric not only as president, but as a businessman exaggerating the size of his buildings and as a television personality exaggerating the audiences for his shows.

Over the past month, he's told stories about topics as irrelevant as when he appeared on Oprah Winfrey's popular TV show, no, that wasn't on Celebrity Finale and that he received the man of the year award for eight years. Michigan before running for office, but he didn't.

No one else is like that

It's unclear how well all these lies actually work for Trump. While that may help rally his loyal base, Trump lost the last election, and polls have reliably found that many more people think he's not honest and trustworthy than think.

What is clear is that there is no other major figure in American federal politics, Republican or Democrat, who lies as often as Trump. President Joe Biden, Trump's first opponent in this election, and Harris, Trump's current opponent, certainly do not.

Biden has a history of improvising occasional lies about his biography, among other things he is not a former truck driver and has not been arrested protesting for civil rights and making blatant statements about statistics.

Harris, a much more cautious speaker than Biden, has made false statements about Project 2025, Trump's economic record and his own policy change on fracking. This comes on top of various controversial predictions about what Trump would do if elected.

But when it comes down to the facts, the two sides in this election simply don't look the same.

I have to carefully review the transcripts of Harris' speeches to see if there might be a statement or two that might be inaccurate. Trump tends to make dozens of blatantly false claims in every speech.

In other words, Trump usually tells more public lies in a single public appearance than Harris tells in a month or more.

The cover hasn't changed much

I have publicly urged the media for years to make fact-checking political lies a central part of their coverage, as CNN does, rather than something to broadcast on a few high-profile nights a year.

Nine years into Trump's political career, daily fact-checking is still not enough. While many media outlets have done a good job debunking his absurdities that are too sensational to ignore, too many of Trump's lie-filled speeches are still covered by most local and national media outlets with, at most, passing reference to the many lies. .

If you met someone at a bar who told you 25 things that weren't true, that would be one of the first things you told other people about that encounter. Trump telling the American people 25 things that aren't true in a rally speech should be one of the first things the media tells its readers and viewers about this speech.

Trump's dismissive response to fact-checks

Maybe then Trump would care a little more about being corrected.

It's standard for political campaigns to try to spin fact-checkers. They will claim, officially or unofficially, that a false claim was actually just a little misleading, or simply lacked a little context, or even that it was true.

The Trump campaign team rarely bothers with this type of persuasion effort. Neither does his White House. Instead, his spokespeople have either ignored requests for comment or sometimes emailed related information that doesn't prove what he said.

I suspect the Trump team's rebuttals are so weak because many of their claims are so indefensible. I also suspect, however, that it's because Trump seems so unconcerned about being called wrong.

He almost never adapted his rhetoric in response to public debunking. No matter what CNN writes, no matter how many Pinocchios the Washington Post awards him, he knows that many more of his supporters will hear the uncorrected false claim via social media, pro-Trump media and, yes, even many mainstream media only hear the truth.

Sometimes he demonstrates that he himself attended the fact-checks. These moments are revealing.

At a public event in mid-October, Trump repeated his lie that recently released federal figures show 13,099 immigrants convicted of homicide entered the country under his administration. CNN and others have pointed out for two weeks that these numbers relate to people who entered the country. the country for decades, including under Trump's own administration, not just under Biden and Harris.

Trump admitted he was aware of this: he quickly said they were trying to say the data covered a longer period than just Biden's presidency.

This is false, he stated falsely, without any explanation. And then he repeated the original lie once again.

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