The 15 most notable lies of Donald Trump's presidency
Analysis by
Daniel Dale (a great Canadian), CNN Updated 9:28 AM ET, Sat January 16, 2021. With slight edits for brevity.
Trying to pick the most notable lies from Donald Trump's presidency is like trying to pick the most notable pieces of junk from the town dump.
The President would say things that we could see with our own eyes were not true. And he would often do this brazen lying for no apparent strategic reason.
The most telling lie: It didn't rain on his inauguration.
It
rained during Trump's inaugural address. Then, at a celebratory ball later that day, Trump
told the crowd that the rain "just never came" until he finished talking and went inside, at which point "it poured."
The most dangerous lie: The coronavirus was under control.
This was more like a family of lies than a single lie. But each one -- the lie that the virus was
equivalent to the flu; the lie that the situation was "
totally under control"; the lie that the virus was "
disappearing" -- suggested to Americans that they didn't have to change much about their usual behavior.
A year into the crisis, more than 386,000 Americans have died from the virus.
The most alarming lie saga: Sharpiegate.
Trump tweeted in 2019 that Alabama was one of the states at greater risk from Hurricane Dorian than had been initially forecast. The federal weather office in Birmingham then tweeted that, actually, Alabama would be unaffected by the storm.
Not great, but fixable fast with a simple White House correction. Trump, however, is so congenitally unwilling to admit error that he embarked on an
increasingly farcical campaign to prove that his incorrect Alabama tweet was actually correct, eventually showcasing a hurricane map that was crudely altered with a Sharpie.
The slapstick might have been funny had White House officials not
leaped into action behind the scenes to try to pressure federal weather experts into saying he was right and they were wrong. The saga proved that Trump was not some lone liar: he was backed by an entire powerful apparatus willing to fight for his fabrications.
The most ridiculous subject of a lie: The Boy Scouts.
When I emailed the Boy Scouts of America in 2017 about Trump's
claim that "the head of the Boy Scouts" had called him to say that his
bizarrely political address to the Scouts' National Jamboree was "the greatest speech that was ever made to them," I didn't expect a reply.
A senior Scouts source -- a phrase I never expected to have to type as a political reporter in Washington, DC --
confirmed to me that no call ever happened.
Yep, the President of the United States was lying about the Boy Scouts.
The ugliest smear lie: Rep. Ilhan Omar supports al Qaeda.
At a White House
event in 2019, Trump grossly
distorted a 2013 quote from Rep. Ilhan Omar to try to get his supporters to believe that the Minnesota Democrat had expressed support for the terrorist group al Qaeda. Trump went on to
deliver additional bigoted
attacks against Omar in the following months.
But it's hard to imagine a more vile lie for the President to tell about a Muslim official -- who had
already been getting death threats -- than a smear that makes her sound pro-terrorist.
The most boring serial lie: The trade deficit with China used to be $500 billion.
Trump, an incorrigible exaggerator, rarely chose to use an accurate number when he could
instead use an inaccurate bigger number. So he said well over 100 times that, before his presidency, the US for years had a $500 billion annual trade deficit with China -- though the actual pre-Trump deficit never even reached $400 billion.
Trump made versions of the "$500 billion" claim so many times that it became
almost physically painful for me to fact check it any more.
The most entertaining lie shtick: The burly crying men who had never cried before.
They were almost always male. They were almost always large. They were almost always blue-collar. And, according to the President, they kept walking up to him crying tears of gratitude -- even though they had almost always not previously cried for years.
Trump's
series of Tears Stories -- which sometimes doubled as
"Sir" Stories -- helped me understand his lying as a kind of performance art.
The stories were oddly grandiose, like something you'd hear from a two-bit foreign strongman. They were also pure shtick. Trump was like a touring stand-up comic, refining and re-using his favored dishonesty bits until they stopped working for him.
The most traditional big lie: Trump didn't know about the payment to Stormy Daniels.
We've established that Trump was not your traditional political liar. One of his distinguishing features is that he lied pointlessly, dissembling about trivial subjects for trivial reasons.
But he also lied when he needed to. When he
told reporters on Air Force One in 2018 that he did not know about a $130,000 payment to porn performer Stormy Daniels.
The President was lying to try to get himself out of a tawdry scandal.
The biggest lie by omission: Trump ended family separation.
Much of Trump's lying was clumsy, half-baked.
"You know, under President Obama you had separation. I was the one that ended it."
Yes, Trump signed a 2018 order to end the family separation policy.
What he did not mention to Todd is that what he had ended was
his own policy -- a plan announced by his own attorney general that had made family separation standard rather than occasional, as it had been
under Obama.
The most shameless campaign lie: Biden will destroy protections for pre-existing conditions
Trump's re-election campaign was consistently and consciously dishonest, especially in its
attempts to cast Joe Biden as a frightening radical.
When Trump
claimed in September that Biden would destroy protections for people with pre-existing health conditions -- though the Obama-Biden administration created the protections, though the protections were overwhelmingly popular, though Biden was running on preserving them.
Trump himself tried repeatedly to weaken them -- Trump was not merely lying but turning reality upside down.
The lie he fled: He got Veterans Choice.
Trump could have told a perfectly good factual story about the Veterans Choice health care program Obama signed into law in 2014: it wasn't good enough, so he replaced it with a more expansive program he signed into law in 2018.
He claimed over and over --
more than 160 times before I lost count -- that he is the one who got the Veterans Choice program passed after other presidents tried and failed for years.
It wasn't until August 2020 that he was asked about the lie to his face.
He
promptly left the room.
The most hucksterish lie: That plan was coming in two weeks
Trump's big health care plan was
eternally coming in "two weeks." So were a bunch of
other plans and announcements.
Trump is, at his core, a huckster. Every moment of his presidency was a chance for him to sell someone on something, whether or not that something actually existed. And if they asked when they could actually see the magic elixir he said was being brewed just over there behind the curtain, he would just have to delay them until they forgot about it.
Trump was once named Michigan's Man of the Year.
Trump has never lived in Michigan. Why would he have been named Michigan's Man of the Year years before his presidency?
He wouldn't have been. He wasn't. And yet this lie he appeared to have invented in the
final week of his 2016 campaign became a staple of his 2020 campaign,
repeated at Michigan rally after rally.
It's so illustrative because it makes so little sense.
The most depressing lie: Trump won the election.
Trump's long White House campaign against verifiable reality has culminated with
his lie that he is the true winner of the 2020 presidential election he clearly, certifiably and fairly lost.
To many of us, it's ludicrous nonsense. But to millions of deluded Americans, it's the
truth. And it has now gotten people killed.
The nation's truth problem, clearly, isn't just a Trump problem.
With this last blizzard of deception and the Capitol insurrection it fomented, Trump has shown us, once more, just how detached from reality much of his political base has become -- or always was.