There’s just so much ugly garbage to sift through before you can make a decision.
But I’m qualified for the dirty job. I fact checked every word uttered by this President from his inauguration day in January 2017 until September 2020 — when the daily number of lies got so unmanageably high that I had to start taking a pass on some of his remarks to preserve my health.
The most telling lie: It didn’t rain on his inauguration
Trump began his presidency by lying about the weather.
It
rained during Trump’s inaugural address. Then, at a celebratory ball later that day, Trump
told the crowd that the rain “just never came” until he finished talking and went inside, at which point “it poured.”
This was the
first lie of Trump’s presidency. Like his lies that same week about his inauguration crowd, it hinted at what would come next.
The President would say things that we could see with our own eyes were not true. And he would often do this brazen lying for no apparent strategic reason.
The most dangerous lie: The coronavirus was under control
This was more like a family of lies than a single lie. But each one — the lie that the virus was
equivalent to the flu; the lie that the situation was “
totally under control“; the lie that the virus was “
disappearing” — suggested to Americans that they didn’t have to change much about their usual behavior.
A year into the crisis, more than 386,000 Americans have died from the virus.
We can’t say with precision how the crisis would have unfolded differently if Trump had been more truthful. But it’s reasonable to venture that his dishonesty led to a significant number of deaths.
The most alarming lie saga: Sharpiegate
Trump tweeted in 2019 that Alabama was one of the states at greater risk from Hurricane Dorian than had been initially forecast. The federal weather office in Birmingham then tweeted that, actually, Alabama would be unaffected by the storm.
Not great, but fixable fast with a simple White House correction. Trump, however, is so congenitally unwilling to admit error that he embarked on an
increasingly farcical campaign to prove that his incorrect Alabama tweet was actually correct, eventually showcasing a hurricane map that was crudely altered with a Sharpie.
The slapstick might have been funny had White House officials not
leaped into action behind the scenes to try to pressure federal weather experts into saying he was right and they were wrong. The saga proved that Trump was not some lone liar: he was backed by an entire powerful apparatus willing to fight for his fabrications.
The most ridiculous subject of a lie: The Boy Scouts
When I emailed the Boy Scouts of America in 2017 about Trump’s
claim that “the head of the Boy Scouts” had called him to say that his
bizarrely political address to the Scouts’ National Jamboree was “the greatest speech that was ever made to them,” I didn’t expect a reply. One of the hardest things about fact checking Trump was that a lot of people he lied about did not think it was…