Trump’s War On Reality: The Lies Have Become The Point!

America’s Firehose of Falsehoods

Despite George Washington having once written that “I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy,” politicians have earned a reputation as characters who play fast and loose with the truth. Abraham Lincoln, Grover Cleveland and Jimmy Carter may have been outliers among American presidents and they’re more rare than less virtuous presidents when it come to the truth-telling department. Andrew Jackson, Warren Harding, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton were notorious liars, even more so than your garden variety successful American political leader. But no one else came anywhere near Trump.

Yesterday we took a quick look at Annie Karni’s case for a Chris Murphy presidential run. In her Times piece she noted that Murphy isn’t dancing around with political niceties and that he’s basically calling Trump a lying sack of shit. “‘Everybody in this country should be outraged that Donald Trump is standing up on that podium and lying to you— deliberately lying to you,’ he said in an impassioned video he recorded and posted within 30 minutes of Trump’s news conference. ‘Every single senator and member of Congress should call him out for how disgraceful it was.’”

Señor T’s relationship with the truth is not just casual disregard— it’s blatant, outright hostility. His lies are not the kind told out of self-preservation or political spin; they are industrial-scale fabrications, deployed with the frequency and shamelessness of a carnival barker trying to fleece the rubes. His entire career, both in business and politics, has been built on deceit— phony university scams, fraudulent charities, fake Time magazine covers hanging in his golf clubs, and a running tally of lies that outpaces any other politician in American history. The Washington Post’s fact-checkers stopped counting after documenting over 30,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency, a number so staggering that it forces the question of whether he even distinguishes between reality and his own fictions anymore.

Unlike Nixon, who at least had the presence of mind to try and cover up his lies, or Clinton, who only lied when cornered, Trump operates with the reckless abandon of a man who knows his followers will never hold him accountable. He lies about the results of elections, about foreign policy, about the economy, about basic science. He lies when the truth would serve him just as well, because to him, lying isn't a tactic—it's an identity. He’s not just the most dishonest president in history; he’s the most dishonest public figure of our time, and his lies aren’t just self-serving— they are a fundamental threat to democracy itself. The establishment media has been reluctant to dwell on this. Yesterday, though, Peter Baker did an analysis of Trump’s congenital lying— and even used the word “lies” in the headline!

He kicked it off with some of the lies Trump spewed last week, lies that the MAGAts tend to buy, hook, line and sinker. “The United States sent $50 million in condoms to Hamas. Diversity programs caused a plane crash. China controls the Panama Canal. Ukraine started the war with Russia. Except, no. None of that is true. Not that it stops President Trump. In the first month since he returned to power, he has demonstrated once again a brazen willingness to advance distortions, conspiracy theories and outright lies to justify major policy decisions.” 

That kind of unvarnished look at Trump’s biggest flaw is a big, big step for the NY Times. “Trump has long been unfettered by truth when it comes to boasting about his record and tearing down his enemies,” wrote Baker. “But what were dubbed ‘alternative facts’ in his first term have quickly become a whole alternative reality in his second to lay the groundwork for radical change as he moves to aggressively reshape America and the world. If the U.S. Agency for International Development is stupid enough to send prophylactics to a Palestinian terrorist group in Gaza, he claims, then it deserves to be dismantled. If recruiting people other than white men to work in the airline sector compromises safety, such programs should be eliminated. If China controls the strategic passage through the continent, the United States should take it back. If Ukraine is the aggressor, it should make concessions to Moscow... Taking his real-estate hucksterism and reality-show storytelling into politics, Trump has for years succeeded in selling his version of events. The world according to Trump is one where he is a master of every challenge and any failure is someone else’s fault.”

He claimed to have built the greatest economy in history during his first term so many times that even some of his critics came to accept that it was better than it really was. He dismissed intelligence reports that Russia intervened in the 2016 elections on his behalf so often that many supporters accepted his denial.

Most significantly, Trump has waged a four-year campaign to persuade Americans that he did not lose the 2020 election when in fact he did, making one false assertion of widespread fraud after another that would all be debunked yet still leave most Republicans convinced it was stolen, according to polls.

At the same time, he has recast the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by supporters trying to stop the transfer of power from a “heinous attack,” as he originally termed it, to a “day of love,” as he now calls it. This revised interpretation helped him rationalize pardoning nearly 1,600 people who were charged, including many who had beaten police officers.

“Trump is a highly skilled narrator and propagandist,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present and a historian at New York University who specializes in fascism and authoritarianism. “Actually he is one of the most skilled propagandists in history.”

Dr. Ben-Ghiat said what made Trump’s “easily refutable lie” about the 2020 election so remarkable was that he was “working not in a one-party state or authoritarian context with a controlled media, but in a totally open society with a free press.”

…Trump’s aides have long recognized his penchant for prevarication and either adjusted or eventually broke with him. John Kelly, his longest-serving White House chief of staff in his first term, has said that Trump would tell his press aides to publicly repeat something that he had just made up. When Kelly would object, saying, “but that’s not true,” Trump would say, “but it sounds good.”

Stephanie Grisham, who served as a White House press secretary in the first term, once recalled that Trump would tell aides that “as long as you keep repeating something, it doesn’t matter what you say.” And that trickled down to the staff. “Casual dishonesty filtered through the White House as though it were in the air-conditioning system,” she wrote in her memoir. 

"Goebbels" by Nancy Ohanian

…“Opponents end up arguing about his narratives regardless of how grounded they are in fact,” said Dr. Zelizer. “This has put President Trump in a perpetual position of advantage since he decides the terms of debate rather than anyone seeking to stop him.”

In Trump’s facts-are-fungible world, conspiracy theories at times are given as much weight as tangible evidence and those who traffic in them are granted access that no other president would give. Just this past week, he talked about going to Fort Knox to see if the nation’s gold really is there, indulging a fringe suspicion that it is somehow missing.

…Trump’s blame-the-victim revisionism over Ukraine in recent days has been among the most striking efforts to translate his alternative reality into policy. Over the course of several recent days, he said that Ukraine “started” the war with Russia in 2022 and called the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a “dictator without elections,” while absolving President Vladimir Putin of Russia, an actual dictator who had invaded his neighbor. He went even further on Friday, saying, “It’s not Russia’s fault.”

By undercutting public sympathy for Ukraine, Trump may make it easier for him to strike a peace agreement with Putin giving Russia much of what it wants even over any objections by Zelensky or European leaders. Since Zelensky is a dictator responsible for the war, this reasoning goes, he deserves less consideration.

One of Trump’s claims about Ukraine offers a case study in his mythmaking. He said that the United States has provided $350 billion in aid to Ukraine, three times as much as Europe, but that much of the money is “missing” and that Zelensky “admits that half of the money we sent him is missing.”

In fact, the United States has allocated about a third of what Trump claimed, even less than Europe, and none of it is known to be missing.

… Once Trump makes an assertion, those who work for him— and want to keep working for him— are compelled to tailor their own versions of reality to match his. Even if it requires them to abandon previous understandings of the facts.

So there was Michael Waltz, the former Republican congressman from Florida now serving as Trump’s national security adviser, pressed last week to reconcile his past comments about who was responsible for the war in Ukraine with his boss’s current position.

A reporter read aloud from an opinion column that Waltz had written in 2023 stating that “Putin is to blame, certainly, like Al Qaeda was to blame for 9/11.” Waltz was asked if he still believed that or whether he now shared Trump’s assessment that Ukraine had started the war.

“Well,” Waltz said carefully, “it shouldn’t surprise you that I share the president’s assessment on all kinds of issues. What I wrote as a member of Congress was as a former member of Congress.”

And so, Waltz’s actual reality gave way to Trump’s alternative version.

And here we are. Trump’s entire life has been built on a foundation of relentless, industrial-scale lying— an unending firehose of falsehoods designed not just to obscure the truth, but to make truth itself irrelevant. In the political realm, this hasn’t just been corruption and cynicism; it’s been a war on reality, the kind of reality-warping deception that has always been a hallmark of authoritarian movements.

The media is finally, hesitantly, calling his lies what they are. Some say it may be too late. His followers, fed a steady diet of conspiratorial nonsense, aren’t just accepting the lies— they’re demanding them. This isn’t about persuasion anymore; it’s about control. The second Trump term isn’t turning out to be about governing so much as vengeance, domination and rewriting history in real time. The question isn’t whether he’ll keep lying. The question is whether we’ve already become too numb to stop him.