News Analysis
Trump’s Wild Claims, Conspiracies and Falsehoods Redefine Presidential Bounds
Throughout his life, Donald J. Trump has bent the truth to serve his needs, never more so than on the campaign trail to win back the White House.
News Analysis
Trump’s Wild Claims, Conspiracies and Falsehoods Redefine Presidential Bounds
Throughout his life, Donald J. Trump has bent the truth to serve his needs, never more so than on the campaign trail to win back the White House.
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Peter Baker has covered the past five presidents and written several books about the presidency, including one on Donald J. Trump.
It took just two minutes for former President Donald J. Trump to utter his first lie of the evening, claiming once again that the 2020 election had been stolen.
By four minutes into the televised interview on Thursday night, he was claiming that this time around “we’re leading by a lot” in the polls, setting up another false claim of a stolen election should he lose on Tuesday.
By five minutes into the program, he had turned to assailing his successor’s record in office and was claiming that in the last few years the country had experienced “the worst inflation we’ve ever had.”
None of that was true. And that was just the first 300 seconds. For the rest of the evening, Mr. Trump spouted one statement after another that was fanciful, misleading, distorted or wildly false. He rewrote history. He claimed accomplishments that he did not accomplish. He cited statistics at odds with the record. He described things that did not happen and denied things that did.
Public appearances by Mr. Trump throughout this year’s campaign have been an Alice-in-Wonderland trip through the political looking glass, a journey into an alternate reality often belied by actual reality. At its most fundamental, it boils down to this: America was paradise on earth when he was in charge, and now it’s a dystopian hellscape. Nuance, subtlety, precision and ambiguity play no role in the version that Mr. Trump promotes with relentless repetition. And it is a version that has found traction with tens of millions of supporters.
Truth is not always an abundant resource in the White House under any president, but never has the Oval Office been occupied by someone so detached from verifiable facts. Mr. Trump’s four years in power were a nonstop treadmill for fact-checkers trying to catch up with the latest. His four years since leaving arguably have posed an even bigger challenge as he descended further into conspiracy theories, particularly around election integrity.
Since leaving the White House, Mr. Trump for the first time has been held accountable in court for deception. He was convicted of 34 felonies for falsifying business records to cover up hush money to an adult film actor. He was found liable in a civil lawsuit for lying to banks about the value of his properties. He was found liable in separate lawsuits for lying about a woman who accused him of sexually assaulting her.
None of that, however, has moved his base of supporters, many of whom accept his argument that the indictments and impeachments and lawsuits and judgments and conviction are part of a wide-ranging plot by partisan Democrats, the “deep state” and a supposedly corrupt news media who are out to get him.
At his rallies, Mr. Trump’s fans tell reporters that they recognize that he may not always have the details just right or that he’s exaggerating to make a point. But in what they consider a buttoned-down, overly sensitive, “woke” world, they find his willingness to confront the establishment bracingly honest in its own way. His certainty is appealing even if his facts are off.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment, but he and his allies have dismissed the notion that professional fact-checkers are neutral arbiters and have waged battle this fall against fact-checking as a practice during interviews and in his lone debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Mr. Trump has tried to turn the tables by calling Ms. Harris the dishonest one. “This one lies so much,” he said last week. But the public trusts her more than him. While 49 percent of Americans surveyed recently by Gallup called Ms. Harris honest and trustworthy, 41 percent said the same of Mr. Trump.
As it happens, time has not changed that assessment. In fact, that number is the same as it was in 2020 and slightly higher than the 38 percent who trusted Mr. Trump in 2016. Even fewer Americans considered Hillary Clinton honest that year, while more Americans considered Joseph R. Biden Jr. trustworthy in 2020. The candidate seen as honest by more people won both times.
But dishonesty is not necessarily punished politically in the way it once was. Since Mr. Trump’s arrival on the presidential stage nine years ago, he has spun so many falsehoods so intensely that he has forced others to deal with what an aide once called “alternative facts.” While his adversaries sputter with indignation, his allies accept his assertions and amplify them in the national conversation.
“No one in American politics has ever lied on this scale,” said Bill Adair, a Duke University professor and author of “Beyond the Big Lie,” published this fall. “His impact is not just in the volume and repetition of lies that he tells but also in the way that he has affected the culture of the Republican Party. He has made it more acceptable to lie, and that’s clear when you listen to debate on the House floor and you hear his lies get repeated, or you watch Fox and you hear his lies get repeated.”
Antagonism to Truth
For generations, Mr. Trump has propelled himself to success in business and politics through an endless string of fabrications. He has lied about his net worth, about the height of his buildings, about the ratings of his reality television show, about the origins of America’s first Black president, about the legitimacy of the 2020 election, about migrants eating pet cats and dogs, even about whether he has visited Gaza.
This was not political at first. It was a modus operandi from the early days when he took over his father’s real estate business. His origin story itself is suffused in mythology. He likes to say that he got his start as a developer with just a $1 million loan from his father, but in fact, his father’s empire provided about $413 million when all the payments are adjusted for inflation, according to a 2018 investigation by The New York Times.
Even when the facts about his own family were inconvenient, he simply switched them. He used to say that his grandfather came from Sweden when in fact he came from Germany. He has said that his father came from Germany when in fact he was born in the Bronx.
When a reporter noted in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic that his grandfather died during the influenza outbreak of 1918-19, Mr. Trump denied it. “Nope, he didn’t die of that,” Mr. Trump insisted. “He died of pneumonia. He went to Alaska and he died of pneumonia.” In fact, his grandfather died 17 years after leaving Alaska.
Some of these may be facts that he simply got wrong, either because he was misinformed or forgetful. But as he strove to make a name for himself as a builder of monumental Manhattan skyscrapers, he embarked on a systematic campaign of embellishment. He wanted every building to be the biggest even if that required stretching the truth. Trump Tower, his pride and joy, is listed at 68 floors even though it is only 58.
That was not a one-off. He has done basically the same with seven other Manhattan buildings. Trump SoHo, a condominium building, had only 43 floors but elevators that listed 46. Trump International Hotel and Tower was listed as a 44-story building under the previous owner but 52 under Mr. Trump even though it did not get any taller. He billed Trump World Tower as the “tallest residential tower in the world” at 90 stories and 900 feet although it was actually 70 stories and 843 feet. “I chose 90 because I thought it was a good number,” he once told The Times.
Mr. Trump likewise exaggerated his own fortune, lobbying the journalists at Forbes magazine to inflate his worth in order to get a better ranking on its richest people list. He even pretended to be someone else, inventing a fake public relations person alternately named John Barron or John Miller so he could call reporters and praise “Mr. Trump” or make false claims.
In his first memoir, “The Art of the Deal,” Mr. Trump explained this away as “truthful hyperbole,” a phrase that resonates to this day. But Tony Schwartz, his ghostwriter, said he himself came up with that language as he struggled with how to write a book that he knew was full of dubious assertions.
“I was always trying to figure out how can I say something that is close enough to believable that I can live with myself while also not pretending more than that,” Mr. Schwartz said in an interview. “‘Truthful hyperbole’ was in lieu of saying, ‘You just lied.’”
He said he rationalized it by assuming that “this doesn’t matter very much” since Mr. Trump was “not going to have an impact on the world.” But what Mr. Schwartz said he discovered about Mr. Trump has had much more impact than he ever imagined. “He has an aversion and antagonism to the truth,” he said. “He has utter disregard for the truth except to twist it as a weapon.”
Facts That Are Not
Mr. Trump’s first campaign was built on a lie. For years, he falsely claimed that President Barack Obama might have actually been born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible for office. According to his now-estranged lawyer, Mr. Trump even lied about his own pursuit of the matter by announcing that he had sent private investigators to Mr. Obama’s birthplace of Hawaii when in fact he had not.
In transforming himself from a celebrity builder into a presidential candidate in 2016, Mr. Trump revised his past. He claimed to have presciently warned the country about Osama bin Laden before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and to have opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, neither of which was true. He falsely claimed to hold the record for the most appearances on the cover of Time magazine, although the real record-holder remains Richard M. Nixon.
When attention turned to Russia, which was trying to intervene in the election on his behalf, Mr. Trump went from boasting that he knew President Vladimir V. Putin to denying that he ever met him. He said he had no business in Russia even though one of his fixers was secretly reaching out to Mr. Putin’s staff as part of an effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
His administration began with a dispute about truth as he insisted that his inaugural crowd size was bigger than Mr. Obama’s had been and claimed that he actually won the 2016 popular vote, which he had actually lost by three million, because of phantom illegal votes. He asserted incorrectly that the United States was on the verge of war with North Korea when he came into office and that the American military had run out of all ammunition.
Every day he seemed to be throwing out “facts” that were not. He complained about the U.S. trade deficit with Canada, even though the United States had a trade surplus with its neighbor. He declared that the United States had never won a case at the World Trade Organization until he came along, even though it had won 90 percent of its cases.
He claimed credit for passing a veterans benefit law that was actually signed by Mr. Obama and said he was defending protections for pre-existing conditions while supporting a lawsuit that would have thrown out those protections. He complained when the pandemic hit that Mr. Obama had left him with no ventilators when in fact there were 16,660 in the stockpile.
Some of his false statements were especially inflammatory and absurd. More than once, he suggested that Joe Scarborough of MSNBC had committed murder. He circulated claims that bin Laden was not actually shot dead during the famous raid in Pakistan and that Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden had the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 killed.
Then there were the quirky claims he constantly made no matter how farcical they sounded. Windmills cause cancer (and lately, he has said, are killing whales). A hurricane was set to hit Alabama even though meteorologists said it would not. To prove his point, he took a Sharpie to a weather map and adjusted the projected path of the storm. And one of the most implausible assertions came when he said, “I do not watch much television,” a surprise to aides who saw the TV set on for as much as eight hours a day.
By the time Mr. Trump left office, his self-described summary of his record was stronger on superlatives than precision. He had built the greatest economy in history, he was the most popular Republican president in history, he did more for Black Americans than any president except possibly Abraham Lincoln, he passed the largest tax cut in history, Mexico was paying for the border wall and China was paying the tariffs he imposed.
None of that was true either. The economy was good but not the best ever. Multiple Republican presidents were more popular among Republicans at their peak than Mr. Trump was. Any number of presidents had a stronger claim to helping Black Americans than he did, such as Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed landmark civil rights, voting and fair housing legislation. Johnson also passed a bigger tax cut as a share of the economy than Mr. Trump did, as did Harry S. Truman, Ronald Reagan and Mr. Obama. Mexico never paid for the wall. Consumers paid the tariffs in the form of increased prices.
The fact-checkers at The Washington Post tabulated it all, cataloging 30,573 false or misleading statements over the course of his four-year presidency. That comes to an average of 21 every day he was in office.
‘Lost by a Whisker’
By the time Mr. Trump left office, he had finally come up with a lie that was so profound, so consequential that it drove a cleavage through American society. Americans might not have cared all that much whether he told the truth about his businesses or his policies; many wrote that off as so much bluster. But now they were forced to take sides on the biggest lie of all, his insistence that he won the 2020 election.
No evidence ever emerged suggesting fraud or wrongdoing on a level that would have changed the outcome in a single state, much less flip the multiple states that would have been required to tilt the Electoral College in his direction. But Mr. Trump said it happened and he said it so often and so intensely that elected officials, political candidates, civic leaders, party figures and even everyday citizens were compelled to declare: Did they believe in the system or did they believe Mr. Trump?
That schism has come to define the country in the past four years and is at the heart of the election wrapping up on Tuesday. The outcome may be reasonably read as a verdict on Mr. Trump’s version of reality. If he wins, he will take it as vindication and has promised to use the next four years seeking “retribution” against those who refused to go along with his false claim. If he loses, his opponents will see it as validation of democracy even as they brace for what will surely be another claim of a stolen election and many Americans may not trust the result.
The question many analysts debate is whether Mr. Trump knows that his account of the 2020 outcome is false or has convinced himself because he simply cannot accept the idea of defeat. Investigations and interviews have made clear that Mr. Trump was told repeatedly that the fraud claims were untrue — not just by his opponents but by his own advisers and appointees. Yet he kept broadcasting them anyway.
Among the people who told Mr. Trump in the weeks after the election that he had lost or that there was no evidence of widespread fraud were his own vice president, Mike Pence; his attorney general, William P. Barr; Mr. Barr’s acting replacement, Jeffrey A. Rosen; multiple other Justice Department officials; Department of Homeland Security officials; Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, and his colleague Eric Herschmann; and Kellyanne Conway, his onetime counselor.
Bill Stepien, the president’s own campaign manager, told him on election night he should not claim victory and later said there was little chance he could still win. Matt Morgan and Alex Cannon, both lawyers for the campaign, told Mr. Pence or his staff that there was not enough evidence of wrongdoing that would change the results. Republican governors and other state officials told him the same. And two firms hired by Mr. Trump’s own campaign to find election fraud came back empty-handed.
Mr. Trump refused to respect any of their evaluations and said he knew the election was stolen because of his own observations. “You know who I listen to?” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last year. “Myself. I saw what happened.”
But even Mr. Trump may not be listening to Mr. Trump quite as much. On a few occasions in recent months, he has acknowledged that he “lost by a whisker,” only to quickly retreat and say, no, he did not. Was that the mask finally slipping? “I did that sarcastically,” he explained during his debate with Ms. Harris.
Whether he truly believes he won four years ago or not, he has persuaded many Americans. A full 33 percent of registered voters, including 66 percent of Trump supporters, agree with his false claims that Mr. Biden did not legitimately win in 2020, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll last month.
Creating Stories
The former president’s campaign in 2024 has once again pushed the boundaries of truth. He has once again distorted and twisted and even invented facts to suit the narrative he has sought to convey.
The most memorable was his claim that illegal Haitian migrants in the town of Springfield, Ohio, are “eating the dogs” and “eating the cats,” never mind that the Haitians there are in the country legally, and both town officials and the Republican governor debunked the claims.
Beyond providing endless fodder for comedians and social media users, the incident offered an important insight into truth-telling in the Trump era. After Mr. Trump endured much mockery without backing down, his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, said that it did not matter whether the tale was actually true or not because it was perfectly acceptable “to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention.”
That was not the only story Mr. Trump created when it came to illegal immigration. He has oversimplified and magnified data to inaccurately suggest that Ms. Harris has “lost” 325,000 migrant children, many of them supposedly dead or trafficked, while misleadingly accusing her and Mr. Biden of setting loose 13,000 migrant murderers. Moreover, Mr. Trump repeatedly asserts that migrant criminals “are conquering areas of our country” as if they were an occupying army, despite denials from local and state officials.
Some of the most striking falsehoods of late were Mr. Trump’s unfounded assertions about the federal response to Hurricane Helene. Among other things, he said that Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia could not reach Mr. Biden when in fact the two had already spoken. He also claimed that the administration was not helping Republican areas when in fact Republican officials on the ground praised the federal response.
And he said that “Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants,” which was not true. Even weeks later, when these claims have been disproved, Mr. Trump still repeats them at rallies and public appearances.
Some of his statements have been head-spinning whoppers, like the claim that F.B.I. agents who searched his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida were prepared to kill him, that hydrogen cars just explode and that Ms. Harris only recently “became a Black person.”
He repeatedly says, untruthfully, that Democratic abortion rights supporters favor killing babies after birth and are so extreme on climate change that “they don’t want windows” on buildings and “they don’t want cows” in the fields.
He ascribes sentiments to his opponents that are more like his own, such as asserting that Ms. Harris has portrayed “everyone who isn’t voting for her as an evil and even subhuman person.” Actually, it was Mr. Trump who called liberals who oppose him “vermin” and said some migrants were “not people” and were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
His rigor on statistics remains as lacking as ever. On Friday, he called the latest monthly employment statistics “the worst jobs report in the history of our country” when in fact it was simply the worst jobs report since the Trump administration, not even counting the pandemic.
Some of his claims may simply be mistakes or bad numbers. But the sheer volume is breathtaking. A Times analysis of a typical Trump rally and a typical Harris rally found 64 false or misleading statements in his compared with six in hers.
Some of his statements are drawn from right-wing media without any evident effort to confirm them. Lately, Mr. Trump has flatly asserted that Ms. Harris lied about working at McDonald’s one summer during college without providing any evidence.
And he continues to boast that his own successes are greater than anyone’s while any setbacks are the fault of conspirators. During a rally on Thursday, he even claimed that he could win the bluest of blue states in an honest contest. “If God came down just for one day to be the vote counter, I would win in California,” he said. Mr. Trump lost California by 4.3 million votes in 2016 and five million votes in 2020. Even divine intervention would not have changed that.
Alternative Reality
Later that night, Mr. Trump went onstage in Arizona for that interview where he repeated claims about the 2020 election and inflation. He was questioned by Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who in an excerpt from a new documentary released a few hours earlier described once being “physically mauled” by an unseen demon while sleeping.
During their conversation, Mr. Trump made a variety of over-the-top claims about immigration and stated that Democrats were practically forcing people to have gender transition surgery. “If you just say, ‘Well, I’m thinking about it,’ they throw you onto an operating table,” he said.
He again falsely claimed to have opposed the Iraq invasion (“I said don’t go in”). He accused his former national security adviser, John R. Bolton, of wanting “to go to war with Russia” over a downed American drone when he meant Iran. He boasted that “I killed Nord Stream 2,” a Russian energy pipeline that he sanctioned but did not kill. And he asserted that he had been “exonerated fully” in the Russia election investigation even though the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III explicitly said his report “does not exonerate him.”
Mr. Trump described an elaborate alternate reality about the bipartisan congressional committee that investigated his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, including his well-worn and flatly untrue claim that it got rid of all of the evidence it collected because it discovered it was wrong to blame Mr. Trump for the attack and was embarrassed.
“Everything’s been destroyed,” he said.
In fact, the evidence is still available online.
Linda Qiu and Dylan Freedman contributed reporting from Washington.
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He has covered the last five presidents and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework. More about Peter Baker
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