Analysis: Donald Trump’s campaign of relentless lying

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

Schools secretly sending children for gender-affirming surgeries without parental consent. Towns and even cities conquered by illegal immigrants. Pervasive election fraud. The highest inflation of all time. Presiding over it all: an illegitimate president who stole the job from the rightful winner.

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

For the third consecutive presidential election, the Republican presidential nominee is running a relentlessly dishonest campaign for the world’s most powerful office. Wildly exaggerating statistics, grossly distorting his opponent’s record and his own, regularly just plain making stuff up, Trump is lying to American voters with a frequency and variety whose only precedent is his own previous campaigns.

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

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

“Donald Trump is the first president to consistently seek to create a separate reality,” said CNN presidential historian Timothy Naftali, a Columbia University research scholar and former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library – not just misleadingly shading the facts or omitting damaging information but endlessly inventing stories out of thin air.

“He’s found,” Naftali said, “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 with the big lie.”

Lies about subjects big and small

This fall, Trump has lied both about important policy subjects for obvious political reasons and about trivial personal subjects for no apparent reason other than that this is what he has always done.

He has lied about immigration more than anything else.

There was widespread coverage of his baseless debate declaration that Haitian migrants are “eating the pets” of American residents of an Ohio city. But he has told equally imaginary stories about “the Congo” emptying prisons to send criminals to the United States (didn’t happen), unspecified other countries emptying their “insane asylums” for the same reason (no evidence for this, either), and Vice President Kamala Harris diverting all of the Federal Emergency Management Authority’s disaster relief money to migrants (nobody did that, let alone Harris herself).

Trump has been persistently deceptive about the economy, too. He has lied over and over about his signature proposal for across-the-board tariffs on imported goods, falsely claiming that tariffs are merely a tax on foreign countries and don’t affect Americans. They are actually paid by US importers, who often pass on costs to average American consumers.

And Trump has continued his long-running effort to rewrite history. In his telling, he publicly warned against the invasion of Iraq (he didn’t), never called to lock up 2016 Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton (he did), and never “even thought about” ending Obamacare (he called to repeal it as a candidate and tried to repeal it as president); Vladimir Putin laughed in Harris’ face when she met with him to try to avert the invasion of Ukraine (Harris has never met Putin); and no Capitol rioter in 2021 was armed with a gun (multiple rioters carried guns).

There’s a political rationale for lies about such important topics. But Trump has also been doing the bewildering lying about inconsequential topics that was a trademark of his rhetoric not only as president but as a businessman exaggerating the size of his buildings and as a television personality exaggerating his show’s ratings.

In the last month, he has told tales about matters as irrelevant as when he appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s popular television show – no, it wasn’t during the star-studded final week – and a “Man of the Year” award he has for eight years claimed he received in Michigan before he ran for office, though he did not.

Nobody else is like this

It’s not clear how well all this lying is actually working for Trump. While it may help whip up his loyal base, Trump lost the last election, and polling has reliably found that far more people think he is not honest and trustworthy than think he is.

What is clear is that there is no other major current figure in US federal politics, either Republican or Democrat, who lies as frequently as Trump does. President Joe Biden, Trump’s initial opponent in this election, and Harris, Trump’s current opponent, certainly don’t.

Biden has a habit of ad-libbing occasional lies about his biography – among various other things, he is not a former truck driver and did not get arrested protesting for civil rights – and making egregious misstatements about statistics.

Harris, a far more careful speaker than Biden, has made false claims about Project 2025, Trump’s economic record and her own policy shift on fracking. That’s in addition to various disputed predictions about what Trump would do in office if elected.

But when it comes to the facts, the two sides in this election are just not alike.

I have to carefully inspect the transcripts of Harris speeches to see if there might be a claim or two that might be inaccurate. Trump tends to make dozens of obvious false claims in each speech.

In other words, Trump habitually tells more public lies in a single public appearance than Harris tells over the course of a month or more.

The coverage hasn’t changed much

I’ve publicly urged media outlets for years to make the fact-checking of political lies a core part of their coverage, as CNN does, rather than something to be wheeled out on a few high-profile nights a year.

Nine years into Trump’s political career, daily fact-checking still isn’t happening enough. While numerous media outlets did a good job debunking his too-sensational-to-ignore “eating the pets” nonsense, too many lie-filled Trump speeches are still covered by most local and national outlets with, at most, a passing reference to the numerous falsehoods.

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 this encounter. Trump telling the American people 25 things that aren’t true in a rally speech should be one of the first things media outlets tell their readers and viewers about the speech.

Trump’s dismissive response to fact checks

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

It’s standard for political campaigns to try to spin fact-checkers. They’ll argue, on or off the record, that a false claim was actually just a bit misleading, or merely missing a bit of context, or even that it was true.

Trump’s campaign team rarely bothers with this type of persuasion effort. His White House didn’t either. Instead, his spokespeople have either ignored requests for comment or, sometimes, emailed over related information that doesn’t come close to proving what he said.

I suspect the Trump team’s rebuttals are so low energy because many of his claims are so indefensible. I also suspect, though, that it’s because Trump appears to have so little concern about being called wrong.

He has almost never adjusted his rhetoric in response to a public debunking. No matter what CNN writes, no matter how many “Pinocchios” The Washington Post awards him, he knows that far more of his supporters will hear the uncorrected false claim – through social media, pro-Trump media outlets and, yes, even many mainstream media outlets – than hear the truth.

Occasionally, he demonstrates that he has himself seen the fact checks. Those moments are revealing.

At a public event in mid-October, Trump repeated his lie that newly released federal figures show that there are 13,099 immigrants with homicide convictions who entered the country “during their administration.” CNN and others had been pointing out for two weeks that these figures are about people who entered the country over decades, including Trump’s own administration, not just under Biden and Harris.

Trump conceded he was aware of this: he said quickly that “they” tried to say the data covered a “longer” period than just the Biden presidency.

“Wrong,” he declared, falsely, without any explanation. And then he repeated the initial lie once more.

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