If his lips are moving, he’s lying.
The New York Times fact-checked Trump’s 63-minute jabbering at a recent Las Vegas campaign stop and found 64 false, inaccurate or misleading remarks — one a minute. That mendacity wasn’t even a record. A contender for the distinction would be Trump’s 64-minute August news conference at Mar-a-Lago that was more monologue than Q&A: He racked up at least 162 lies, misstatements and vast exaggerations by NPR’s count — about 2.5 a minute.
And of course there’s the final tally on his presidency from the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, dispenser of those ignominious Pinocchios: a total 30,573 lies and misleading statements and tweets. That’s nearly 20 a day, starting on Day 1 with Trump’s lies about the size of his inauguration crowd and the weather — he denied it rained, when former President George W. Bush’s meme-worthy struggles with a poncho clearly proved otherwise — and, in his inaugural address, about the supposed “carnage” he’d inherited. (“That was some weird s—,” Bush muttered as he exited.)
Trump has been lying ever since, most ominously in still denying his 2020 defeat at virtually every rally. The dishonesty has mounted as he runs again for reelection. Pathological lying ought to be a disqualifier for the office, yet for nearly half the electorate it’s not. Sure, shading the truth is a feature of politics, not a bug. But lying on Trump’s scale is a bug, and a venomous one.
The lies are bad enough, but it’s why he’s lying that’s even more disqualifying: to divide us, between “patriots” who support him and those who are un-American because they do not. It’s what he’s lying about: matters that should unite Americans, such as disaster responses, the U.S. standing in the world at times of crises, the integrity of our elections and the facts about the unprecedented insurrection on Jan. 6. And it’s how he gets away with it: by discrediting a free press and playing to propagandist channels of the right.