Dishonesty is the defining characteristics of Trump and his administration, and lies are a daily occurrence. While there are far too many lies to track, I thought a thread dedicated to the worst and most notable lies would be useful. There’s a lot of material to choose from.
(I could have tapped into a rich vein of lies simply by linking to Trump’s Truth Social account — hence the OP title.)
In 2016 a news organization (maybe PBS) interviewed a guy from CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) who had been assigned to follow Trump and keep track of how many lies he told. I wonder how long he lasted and where he had to recuperate afterwards.
Joe:
He probably ended up in the same rehab where the Washington Post fact checkers went after Trump’s first term. After meticulously cataloguing and fact-checking more than 30,000 of his first-term lies in a publicly-available database, the WaPo folks declined to continue the project during his second term, citing exhaustion:
Scott Bessent and Stephen Miller occasionally say about Trump’s posts that “Trump truthed out….” The evident aim with attempting to make “truth out” a common verb (the way “google” became a verb) is to normalise the perception that, when it’s on Truth Social posted by Trump, it’s the truth, nothing to debate.
The aim was already achieved in Trump’s first term before Truth Social became a thing, so the attempt is completely unnecessary.
Good point by Erik. From a framing point of view, we (non-Trumpers) should not refer to it as Truth Social, but just say, more generically, that he posted on his social media site, or something like that.
Or maybe “Untruth Social” would be good!
keiths,
you are not naive enough to believe that politicians will tell the truth publicly, are you?
J-Mac:
Are you naive enough to believe that they never tell the truth publicly? Truthfulness is a spectrum, and Trump is way out on the low tail of the distribution.
For the entire seven months of our Trump discussion, colewd has bizarrely insisted that Trump isn’t a liar despite being showered with evidence that he is. In the other thread, he issued this challenge to Allan:
Bill’s escape hatch is to argue that the thousands of untrue things that Trump has said are unintentional, and that if they’re unintentional, they’re not lies. That’s laughable, I’ve explained why, and I’m sure we’ll revisit it in this thread.
I responded to Bill:
colewd:
Does “30,573” sound vague to you? It seems like a pretty specific number to me. Let’s add “vague statistic” to your homework list.*
I showed you Trump’s “prices are down” lie, and you’re avoiding it. Man up, Bill. You issued the challenge, so it’s up to you to engage when someone takes you up on it.
I say Trump is lying about prices. You say he isn’t. The facts aren’t in question; prices are up, not down. If you’re right, Trump isn’t being dishonest. He’s just a lost, confused, delusional old man who truly thinks prices are down when the opposite is true. Are you comfortable with that? Because that’s the direct implication of your argument that the lies are unintentional.
Don’t avoid the question. Tell us: do you believe that your Dear Leader is addled, stupid, delusional, mentally incompetent? If not, why do you claim that he isn’t actually lying when he claims that prices are down?
I don’t blindly trust the Washington Post or any other news outlet. I know how to fact check. It’s a skill you really ought to cultivate.
* The list as of today:
An assortment of Trump quotes regarding inflation:
Gasoline prices are up: $3.06 now vs $3.05 one year ago, according to government statistics.
Grocery prices are up 3.1% from a year ago.
Inflation was 3.0% when Trump took office. It’s 3.0% now. He hasn’t even reduced inflation, much less “defeated” it.
Household energy costs are up 6.2% from a year ago.
They were $3.05 a year ago, and they’re slightly higher now.
Not the same things. The 2025 dinner has fewer items, some of the items are smaller, and some of the items are store brand instead of name brand. Trump’s comparison is meaningless.
And:
And:
We are the affordability, he says proudly.
Besides the fact that he’s lying about the “great job” that he and the Republicans have done, I think it’s hilarious that he refers to affordability as “the affordability”. It’s an alien concept to him, like the word “groceries”.
“Everybody knows”? Nope. Prices are up and it’s more expensive under Trump than it was a year ago under Biden.
There’s more where those came from. OK, Bill, explain to us how Trump isn’t lying about all of those things. And if you really want to argue, totally implausibly, that he actually believes all of those things, tell us why it’s good to have a president who is so mentally incompetent that he cannot even assess the economy, much less manage it effectively.
keiths,
Some prices are down for instance gas and energy.
Trump says that gas prices are at $2.40, soon $2 or less. Explain how this is not a lie.
Real prices here https://gasprices.aaa.com/todays-state-averages/
Erik,
Look more carefully at what he said.
I quoted him more accurately now. It did not make it any more right though.
Edit: He says it’s $2.40 right now, when the cheapest price in the cheapest state is $2.50. Trump’s apparent method seems to be to cherry-pick the cheapest number and then lie about even that.
Trump is a liar. What he says about prices is a small lie. You fail to acknowledge even this tiny lie as fatally as you fail to acknowledge any of his other lies, much bigger lies that should be much easier to notice. You are a hopelessly brainwashed cultist. You are in the cult of lying. You are a stinking liar yourself.
Erik,
You failed to support this claim that is very difficult to support as you need to prove intent. If you want to maintain credibility make claims you can support.
A claim against Trump which is supportable is that he often used hyperbolic language. This is more true in the past then it is today.
It’s not that hard.
1. You said gas prices are going down.
2. You saw Trump saying a gas price that does not exist (UNLESS his stated gas price existed at the time he said it AND gas prices WENT UP after that, contradicting your statement that gas prices are going down)
3. Now you’re saying I failed to support my claim when it is actually your claim that is unsupported
Did *you* do this unintentionally somehow? No, you lied. You know you lied. You are so busted.
And so is Trump. Did he pull his number *unknowingly* out of nowhere? No, he pulled a number out of nowhere while at the same time saying stuff about “fake news”, so he was trying to correct someone else’s picture, thus he necessarily had to be aware of what he was doing. As the rest of us already knew, Trump himself is the fake news, and incorrigible too.
colewd:
Here is the definition of denial:
You are the individual, the painful reality is that Trump is lying about energy costs, that causes you distress, so you simply deny reality. You’re a textbook case.
First, I’ll note that even if energy costs were down, it wouldn’t turn Trump’s lie into a truth. “Gas is cheaper, therefore groceries are cheaper” is not a valid argument. You understand that, right? Gas prices can move independently of grocery prices and vice versa.
Second, energy costs aren’t down. They’re up sharply. “Up sharply” is not “down”, except in the MAGA cult where up needs to be down for purely emotional reasons. Trump has not only failed on energy costs, he’s lying about it.
Here are some more statistics that you will ignore:
Trump has lied about each of those, and I gave you the quotes.
In an effort to piece through the shield of denial you’re hiding behind, let me ask you this: Can you at least admit that Trump’s statements are false? That would be progress, and then we could address the question of intent.
colewd:
First; lol.
Second, the fact that a claim is hyperbolic doesn’t mean that it isn’t a lie. Trump claimed he had 200 trade deals at a time when he had zero. You could argue that this was a hyperbolic claim, but it was also an outright lie.
Trump, today:
That’s a triple lie. First, those Democratic lawmakers did not tell the military to disobey Trump’s orders. Second, what they did is not a crime. Third, I couldn’t find a single “GREAT LEGAL SCHOLAR”, much less “MANY”, who thinks that the Democrats committed a crime.
keiths,
Essentially saying that at least some of his orders would be illegal.
The Dems who made the ad are mishandling the pushback they are receiving. They hide behind that it’s part of existing protocol to refuse illegal orders. A better reply would be to point out Trump’s illegal orders, such as attack on Iran and attacks on fishing boats.
Further, to really address those illegal orders, the onus is on the Congress, not on regular soldiers. Trump has to be impeached asap for starting unauthorised wars.
The reality is that, sadly, Dems love illegal wars started by USA as much as all “patriotic” Americans. So their answer misplaces the onus, fails to assign responsibility where it belongs, and fails to properly follow through with what they started – the rightful accusation that Trump is issuing lawless orders.
keiths,
We’re almost 20 posts in and the op and claims of lying have not been supported with real evidence.
Proving a lie means intent to deceive. Where is one case where there is a false statement and proof he intended to deceive knowing the statement he made was false?
I proved Trump’s gas prices lie beyond a reasonable doubt. You just do not care about proof.
And Trump’s criminal incompetence (as well as your bad faith commenting) has always been blindingly obvious since his first term. And actually his lies in his first term are obvious too – only brainwashed cultists think that the Big Lie is not a lie. You’re a bad-faith brainwashed cultist.
Erik,
Again you simply make a bald assertion. Proof includes his intent and this needs strong evidence and you have supplied none.
colewd,
As we’ve all said many times, your (bizarre, inexplicable) defence of him requires that, instead of lying, he is delusional. 30,000+ times. I think for global security it would be preferable if the President of the USA were not delusional. But if you’d rather think that he is…
Allan Miller,
You said he is lying as a repeated claim. Either the anti Trump group is lying or they don’t know what a lie is or the truth does not matter.
My conclusion is the truth does not matter to the far left and they are projecting their own dishonesty onto Trump. Allan maybe you are not far left so we can see. I honestly don’t see the truth as an important value to far left democrats or far right republicans.
Pick the most egregious statement in your opinion out of the ” 30000 lies” and let’s test it to see if it passes the sniff test on any of your two choices.
Eric’s claim is that Trump said Gas are down to as low as 2.40 a gallon when it is actually down to 2.50 cents a gallon. Would you call him either delusional or a liar for this claim?
I would say his estimate is close enough for government work 🙂
Look at the numbers Kieths posted. Is he a liar because he has severely spun the data as he has ignored the early Biden inflation? Is Keiths delusional or a liar?
Allan, to colewd:
Which suggests that Bill himself is either delusional or lying.
I lean toward the latter, because I think Bill can grasp that when Trump says tens of thousands of untrue things, all of which happen to be to his advantage, then it isn’t a coincidence. It’s intentional.
Why would Bill lie in defense of his cult leader? The question answers itself.
But let’s suppose Bill actually does think that Trump isn’t lying about the “sedition”. If so, that would mean that according to Bill, Trump believes that the military is obligated to follow his orders, legal or illegal, and that anyone who says otherwise is seditious.
Bill, is that what you think Trump believes? Do you understand that what the Democrats said is correct, and that military members aren’t obligated to follow illegal orders? Do you think the Democrats should be punished for telling the truth?
Also, given your hand-wringing about violence-fueling rhetoric in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death, how do you feel about Trump’s suggestion that what they did is
If some prominent figure on the left had said “Charlie Kirk deserves to die”, you would have denounced it, and you would have been right to do so. But do you really care about violent rhetoric, or is that just another fake principle that gets tossed in the garbage as soon as your Dear Leader runs afoul of it?
colewd:
Why should he bother responding to your challenge if you’re just going to run away when he gives his response, the way you ran away from mine?
I already showed you the facts:
Trump:
keiths:
Unless slightly higher is the same thing as “way down”, I’d say Trump isn’t “close enough for government work”. However, you are in the Trump cult, where failure is success, good is bad, truth is false, so I suppose for you, up is down. Those of us in the reality-based community beg to differ.
Look, I understand why this is so difficult for you and Trump both. Trump is a malignant narcissist, and you are a cult member. Trump has failed badly on inflation, but as a narcissist he can’t admit that, so he lies. You as a cult member can’t acknowledge his failure either, so you lie, selectively ignore evidence that is presented right under your nose, and accuse your interlocutors, who are telling the truth, of being liars.
Not a very inspiring performance, and it just makes you and Trump look worse. But it’s all you’ve got.
colewd:
I wish you would do that.
I haven’t spun the data. What I said is correct:
Trump:
keiths:
Biden’s “early inflation” has nothing to do with it. The question is, what has Trump done with the economy that Biden handed to him at the end of his term? Biden handed him an economy with 3.0% inflation, and it’s still at 3.0%. Trump hasn’t even put a dent in inflation, much less “defeated” it.
It’s even worse. Trump actually promised to bring prices down, which would require a negative rate of inflation. Inflation is the rate of change of prices; 3% inflation means prices are 3% higher after a year. Trump would need to get that down to zero merely to keep prices steady, and he’d have to get it below zero to make prices decrease. He’d have to get it way below zero to get prices “way down”.
IIRC, you are a college graduate. Did you take economics? Do you understand why Trump’s promise was obviously false, the moment he made it, to anyone who is economically literate?
Trump needed to get inflation substantially below zero, but he hasn’t budged it at all. He is a complete failure where prices are concerned, but he continues to lie about it.
Which makes sense. He’s a liar. Liars are gonna lie, and while you as a cult member can’t accept that, it’s obvious to anyone who is objective.
Besides Trump being both a liar and a dangerously incompetent moron, the additional problem is that you’re a liar too, constantly lying for your Fuehrer.
The gas price per gallon is not “actually down to 2.50”. It’s not the national average that Trump should have been citing for the number to be workable. Also, in context he was citing the number to push back on “fake news”, so by lying about gas prices he was revealing that he himself is fake news. And you side with Trump’s lies and fake news, as you always do, as intentionally as your Fuehrer.
colewd,
It is simply laughable to adopt the position “Trump never lies”. All politicians do. They’re famous for it. Trump in particular.
He is also trigger-happy litigious. The man who thinks he can extort from the BBC for a misleading edit of his actual words has not touched the Washington Post for its 30,000+ lies, nor our Channel 4 four 5 hours of them.
Why not? If he is simply deluded?
Just for current examples, here is an interesting article”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/cnn-fact-checker-drops-a-stunning-78-examples-exposing-trump-s-latest-lie/ar-AA1R8gQx?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=6925ebf8c7da43f39f005c354f98e524&ei=55
Irony alert. This year’s Reith Lecture was by Rutger Bregman, on the theme of the moral decay of the ‘elites’. The BBC, on legal advice, removed the line ““the most openly corrupt president in American history.” Bregman was understandably unhappy, particularly as his theme was about not bending the knee to authoritarians, and the BBC’s jumpiness was about… editing. He would have the First Amendment right to say it in America, but not in a programme broadcast in America…
The BBC has redeemed itself by covering this enforced edit on its main bulletins. “We’re not allowed to tell you what was removed”.
This has probably ensured that the words reach a wider audience than would have been the case if left in!
Flint:
Besides being another egregious example of Trump lying, it’s also a beautiful illustration of how childish he is. He’s obsessed with being thanked. Remember his comment about Gaza food aid?
A decent human being would be content in the knowledge that the US had saved people from starving. For Trump, it’s “What about me? What do I get?”
I wonder how many times Trump has thanked Zelenskyy, whose country is doing the US and the west a great service by resisting Russian expansionism. Instead Trump is whining about how Zelenskyy hasn’t thanked him or the US, which is a complete lie, as the article Flint linked to explains.
The toddler in chief:
Mom:
Speaking of Ukraine, a bipartisan group of senators report that Marco Rubio told them that the Ukraine peace plan wasn’t even authored by the administration, but instead was basically a Russian wish list:
Ronald Reagan must be rolling over in his grave at how weak Trump is on Russia.
Meanwhile, Trump TACOed again. After setting a firm deadline of Thursday for Ukraine to accept the plan, Trump now says
Besides Trump chickening out, the whole thing was ridiculous to begin with, because Ukraine hadn’t even been consulted on the plan. Now the US and Ukraine are talking, which should have happened in the first place before Trump flapped his gums and issued a fake deadline.
ETA: If all of that weren’t pathetic enough:
Trump Envoy Busted Plotting With Russia to Sabotage Ukraine
Witkoff actually coached the Russians on how to flatter Trump to get him to accept their peace plan. Our chief Ukraine negotiator is a Russian agent. Pathetic. He should be fired, but of course the White House is defending him.
Allan Miller,
The position is no evidence of this assertion has been established. It remains left wing propaganda. In order to vote competently you need to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff.
What political parties are good at is spreading propaganda. How do you weed through this to get to the substance?
One way is to monitor promises made vs promises kept.
colewd,
Nobody has ever been proven to lie by your absurd standard. And of course, as with ‘TDS’, your knee-jerk ‘left-wing propaganda’ confirms your cultism. It is unthinkable to you that Trump has even lied one time. If he uttered any untruths, he thought them true, hence even his untruths aren’t lies. Ridiculous cultism.
Which you signally fail to do. To call it all ‘chaff’, not one grain of wheat among 30,000+ is utterly ridiculous.
Why doesn’t he sue? Because he’d lose.
colewd:
I’ve demonstrated to you that Trump is lying about prices. That’s reality, not propaganda.
Correct. We do that. You don’t.
You apply basic critical reasoning skills and media literacy. Since you don’t have those skills, you need to obtain and apply them. Should we start explaining to you how it’s done? This conversation is now approaching the 8-month mark. How many factually false, propagandistic statements have you caught us making vs the number we’ve caught you making? Do you want to get better at this, or are you afraid? The truth can be pretty distressing when you’re a cult member.
Here’s a promise:
Inflation is as high as it was when Trump took office. Has he kept his promise? Has he ended inflation?
And:
Has he slashed energy and electricity prices? Household energy costs are up 6.2% from a year ago. Electricity is up too (see below). Does that count as “slashing”? Promise kept, or complete failure?
We’re watching, Donald. They haven’t come down and they haven’t come down fast. Health insurance premiums are about to double on average for Obamacare enrollees, and they’re increasing for everyone else, too. The polls show that Americans think you’re doing a shitty job on the economy. They’re correct. You’ve failed, once again, to keep your promise.
Prices are up, not down. Has Trump rapidly driven prices down, Bill? Inside the Trump cult, where up is down, perhaps he has. But poke your nose outside of the warm blanket of the cult and ask yourself: Does failing to keep a promise count as keeping that promise?
Promise made, promise nowhere near being kept. A complete failure.
I showed you that gasoline is actually higher than a year ago: $3.06 vs $3.05. Is $3.06 below $2 ? Has Trump kept his promise?
Electricity is up 5.1%.
Groceries are up 2.7%.
Airfare is up 3.2% .
Housing is up 3.6%.
If prices are up, has Trump brought them down? Has he kept his promise? Please give both answers: the inside-the-cult answer and the reality-based answer.
Given the numbers I’ve presented to you in this thread, how well do you think Trump has kept his promises on affordability? Can you allow yourself to see how badly he’s failed? Do you recognize that he’s lying in an attempt to cover up his failures, or is that too distressing for you to contemplate?
A psychological observation. Note Bill’s phrasing here:
Note the awkward phrasing. Notice how it’s “the position is”, not “my position is”. I wonder if that’s a sign that Bill, perhaps subconsciously, wants to distance himself from a position he knows is false.
It’s interesting having a cult member available to study up close.
Another Trump lie during the turkey-pardoning ceremony yesterday:
He was speaking about Washington, DC. In reality, there have been 62 murders there in the last six months, including 24 since Trump’s illegal National Guard invasion. Illegal as determined by a federal judge who ruled just last Thursday.
It’s typical Trump: he doesn’t care about the law, he doesn’t care about the people of DC, who don’t want the troops there, and he doesn’t care about the truth.
keiths,
Interesting also that unless one can prove the lie, to the impossible standard that we have to categorically know his mental state, it is left-wing propaganda – with no proof of that required.
The position is explicitly NOT “All these statements are true”. The position is that the sheer number of self-serving falsehoods he and his kakistocrats utter is entirely irrelevant, because he might just be that deluded.
I’m with keiths, we are fortunate to have one (or two) to study here.
I asked Grok to fact check his latest rant. 60% of factual claims don’t hold up. Just in one post. Grok, of course, only trains on ‘far left data’, thanks to closet leftie Elon Musk, and Trump never says things he knows to be untrue, right? 🙄
The ’48 stock highs’ claim is a bizarre one. Yes, stocks have been rising, but counting peaks on a sawtooth is a weird way to express this. I suspect many Presidents have seen a greater number of per-month highs, particularly during periods of volatility. “No-one’s ever seen such volatility before”?
Even this would be a lie, had he attempted to put it this way. The guy is wrong about and bad at everything, including volatility. But he would perhaps be right if it’s volatility caused personally by a sitting president.
If we treat the stock index as a continuous variable, any period of ascent higher than a prior level generates an infinity of stock highs…
The very post you respond to directly detail three manifest lies.
colewd is just using a double standard again. He was much quicker to dismiss the testimonies of women who were assaulted by Trump.
Truth social< as Trump sees the truth??? Can he? Does he care about truth?
What is truth?
During Trump’s first term, it was reported that the only way to keep his attention on the daily briefing was to mention him at least once per paragraph. Later, it was reported that if there were no pictures, he wasn’t interested. Today, reporting is that he no long has a morning briefing at all – and that’s because he’s not interested, and NOT because he doesn’t work in the morning anymore.
He is used to watching Fox News – and at the same time rage-tweet about what (he thinks) he is seeing. During his first term, when there were intelligence briefings, he started tweeting about those, so intelligence briefings had to be stopped for obvious reasons. It makes sense that this is now the destiny of all other briefings. No worries, Fox News provides all the information a president might need anyway.