The World's Biggest Liar Is Back — and How to Defeat Him

During this year’s presidential election campaign, I was puzzled and increasingly troubled that the issue of truth-telling — and the spectacular lack of it from one candidate — wasn’t getting the sort of focus or emphasis in the news coverage it should have received. We heard or read about Donald Trump’s specific false statements just about every day (because they happened just about every day). But we didn’t often hear about the deeper questions those falsehoods raised and continue to raise: What will it mean to have a president of the United States who has no regard for the truth and often no idea what it is? What will it do to public life if a president’s words can’t be trusted, no matter what he’s talking about? What are the possible consequences if a president consistently ignores or distorts proven facts, and how much will those distortions shape his policy decisions and actions?

For obvious reasons those questions became more significant, not less, with Trump’s victory. His habitual disregard for the truth isn’t just an old story from a past presidency, but today’s and tomorrow’s news for the next four years. So, journalists, opinion-makers, and anyone else whose voice reaches the public need to keep raising the issue in the weeks leading up to Trump’s second inauguration and after he takes office. That means not just calling out individual falsehoods but connecting the dots, reminding us of his overall record and what it should tell us about the next phase of American public life. Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute and a co-founder of the fact-checking website PolitiFact, got it right in a fundraising email two days after the election when he reminded supporters that “facts are the foundation of our reality.” Checking facts, he went on, “is time-consuming but essential… There is no off switch on the dial of misinformation.”

For the most part, we have no way of knowing which of Trump’s false statements are conscious lies — when he’s saying something he knows isn’t true — and when he believes his own words because they fit into the made-up world he’s concocted in the insulated bubble of his mind. But that distinction hardly matters when it comes to what kind of president he’ll be. A chronic liar or chronically delusional, either one is a dangerous person to have in the White House for the next four years. That makes it essential to keep a spotlight not just on specific factual issues as they crop up in the news, but on the broader credibility question as well, tracking the misinformation Trump and his crew will almost certainly spew out and, where possible, countering its influence on policy decisions and official actions.

On Immigration, A Stunning Record of Untruths

Perhaps the most immediate and urgent need for that kind of fact-checking will be on immigration policy, where Donald Trump has consistently misrepresented essential facts for many years. The sheer volume of those falsehoods is breathtaking. A recent report from the Marshall Project, a nonprofit investigative news site, documented 12,000 false statements of his on that issue alone — no, that’s not a misprint, twelve thousand untrue statements! — during his years in the public arena. I searched but found no indication that Trump has ever backed down from any of them or acknowledged that anything he said on the subject was untrue. Corroborating that impression, Anna Flagg, one of the coauthors of the Marshall Project paper, wrote in response to an email inquiry that she is “personally not aware of Trump correcting any of these statements.”

Far from correcting such falsehoods, he has often repeated them even after they were thoroughly and conclusively debunked. One of many examples was his claim in a late September blog post that “13,000 convicted murderers entered our Country during [Kamala Harris’s] three and a half year period as Border Czar — Also currently in our Country because of her are 15,811 migrants convicted of rape and sexual assault.” Journalists quickly established that those numbers, listed on a chart prepared by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), were, in fact, a count of people who had entered the country over a more than 40-year time span, including Donald Trump’s four years as president. That airtight refutation didn’t stop him from repeating the same false allegation a month later, when he declared in an interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan that “other countries are allowed to empty their prisons into our country with murderers, we had 13,099 murderers dropped in our country over the last three years.”

Nor were those murderers able to “freely and openly roam our Country,” as Trump claimed in yet another post. The list of convicted murderers, a DHS spokesperson told CNN, included “many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.” (Confusingly, the DHS chart lists all 13,099 as “undetained,” but that means only that they weren’t in the custody of the U.S. immigration agency, not that they weren’t in state or federal prisons.)

Another example came during Trump’s September 10th debate with Kamala Harris, when, speaking about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, he alleged that “in Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there” — a story police and local officials had already declared to be untrue. Trump also regularly exaggerates the number of Haitians actually in Springfield, as when he told listeners to the Rogan podcast that “32,000 migrants that don’t speak the language” had been “dropped” there. The actual estimate is 10,000-12,000.

Reminding us of the facts when it comes to those and numerous other distortions is crucially important now that Trump will again be in a position not just to bluster about immigration but to execute policies that will affect huge numbers of men, women, and children. Starting now, fact-checkers should do everything they can to make Americans aware of the actual facts — such as the strong likelihood that the mass deportations he’s vowed to launch “on day one” of his presidency will upend the lives of many people who are not illegal immigrants but are in the U.S. legally (a category that includes almost all of the Haitians in Springfield that Trump wants sent “back to their country”).

In that effort, truth-tellers should also monitor statements by advisers who have their own records of incendiary anti-immigrant rhetoric — particularly, Tom Homan, Trump’s prospective “border czar,” and Stephen Miller, one of the principal architects of the sweeping ban on Muslim immigrants that Trump imposed early in his first term, who is slated to return to the White House as deputy chief of staff.

Other Places to Set the Record Straight

Along with spreading the truth about immigration, fact-checkers monitoring Trump and his team should do what they can to correct counterfactual statements on other important issues the new administration will be dealing with. Climate change is one example of a crucial issue where Trump has regularly minimized the risk, espoused policies (“drill, baby, drill”) that will increase the danger, and misrepresented scientific evidence (as in his assertion that “the ocean will rise 1/8 of an inch over the next 200 to 300 years,” a figure thousands of times less than the 10 to 12-inch rise over 30 years predicted by the U.S. government’s Interagency Task Force on Sea Level Change).

Fact-checking will also be highly relevant on a looming subject that has potentially significant implications not for government policy but for public trust in the American legal and judicial system: the end, permanent or temporary, of criminal proceedings against Donald Trump himself. Barring unforeseen surprises, it appears certain that the cases against him will either be dropped or put on indefinite hold, probably before he even takes office. When that happens, he will undoubtedly insist that he’s been completely exonerated, did nothing wrong, and was unjustly prosecuted for political reasons. Presumably, that claim will be challenged, but it’s another case where fact-checkers should be at work reminding the public of what he’s been accused of doing, detail by detail, and recalling what the evidence has shown us about Trump’s past actions and the true origins of those cases. (Some new material on the subject may be added to that record before inauguration day in a report special prosecutor Jack Smith is expected to submit to the Justice Department after he closes out the two federal cases against Trump that he’s overseen for the last two years. At this writing, it’s not 100% certain when or even if Smith’s report will be officially released, but it’s hard to imagine that any significant new information in it will be successfully suppressed.)

More broadly and looking further ahead, fact-checking — not just labeling particular statements false as they occur, but systematically keeping track of and reporting on the cumulative record of Trump’s misstatements — should be a top priority during the new administration. A possible model is the Washington Post’s project during Trump’s first presidency, when its staffers maintained a database of his untruths. The Post’s final tally was 30,573 false or misleading claims during his time in the White House — an average of 21 untruths a day for four years! If the Post and other publications do something similar this time around, I hope they will periodically publish their findings, both as front-page stories and perhaps a front-page box every week or two with the totals and notable examples during the preceding interval.

Don’t Just Challenge Trump

One more suggestion for journalists: while tracking Trump’s false statements in the coming weeks and months, don’t just seek comments from him or his mouthpieces, but follow up on factual questions with other Republican politicians. Whenever possible — at confirmation hearings, say (if Trump doesn’t succeed in bypassing that check-and-balance procedure) — reporters should press congressional Republicans to respond to his falsehoods and declare on the record what they believe is true. For example: “Senator, do you believe that 13,000 murderers from other countries were admitted to this country during the Biden administration and are now walking around free in American cities and towns?” And if the senator or representative dodges the question, as many undoubtedly will, follow it up: “Senator, are you aware that those murderers came over a period of 40 years, not just the last four, and that quite a few of them are in prison, not ‘walking around free’?” You get the idea.

If and when a Republican politician does actually acknowledge a Trump falsehood, the reporter shouldn’t let it go at that, but ask a further set of questions: “Have you told people who voted for you and your party that this story isn’t true and what the actual facts are? Do you and other members of your party have any obligation to act against the spread of such false beliefs so that what your supporters think will be based on verified facts and not the president’s false information?”

It’s almost impossible to believe that any ongoing fact-checking effort will change Trump’s style or make his public discourse any more truthful. Nor will it convince his diehard supporters, who will continue to trust his statements no matter what the evidence shows. But there must be people out there who voted for him but are still open-minded enough to be convinced by the actual facts. Presumably, more of those people will accept more of those facts when they hear them not from Trump’s opponents or the news media but from their side of the political divide, from Republican office holders or others they believe represent their views. So, it will be critical for fact-checkers to keep the pressure on elected officials and others who have some credibility with Trump’s constituents and challenge them to publicly correct the falsehoods that we can confidently expect will continue pouring out from his White House.

The record of that group up to now does not inspire much hope. With only a few honorable exceptions, Republican politicians’ loyalty to Trump has consistently outweighed any loyalty to the truth. But now, when his conscious and unconscious falsehoods are about to be combined with presidential powers and so will pose potentially unfathomable dangers for American public life, reversing the balance between those conflicting loyalties is more urgent than in the last eight years or perhaps ever in our history. Confronting lies and correcting untruths will be essential in meeting that threat — and I hope fact-checkers and truth tellers will rise to the challenge.