Trump's lies disgrace everyone around him
Including judges he nominated to lifetime roles.
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Eleven years after Donald Trump came down that escalator in Trump Tower, Republican lying has become normalized to a disturbing degree. But even so, there’s something about how his second-term appointees make a mockery of the truth that’s especially galling.
Trump, of course, is an Olympian liar who lies daily, if not hourly. The Washington Post chronicled 30,573 lies during his first term, roughly 21 per day. The quantity of lies matter, but so do their quality. Trump tells whoppers so provably false that defending him compels supporters to degrade themselves.
We expect right-wing hacks like Benny Johnson to repeat Trump’s most absurd falsehoods. But it was stunning to witness Trump’s Chief of Staff Susie Wiles — a longtime Florida political operative, daughter of legendary sportscaster Pat Summerall, and 2024 Trump campaign manager — echo Trump’s favorite lie.
At a recent public forum, Wiles recalled a post-2020 election dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in which Trump inquired “why he won Florida but maybe struggled in some other states that I think we’re going to find out he actually did win.” (Watch below.)
This stolen election lie is so destructive — it led, of course, to January 6 — that Trump’s detractors and the media feel compelled to distinguish it as “The Big Lie.” Trump knows it’s a lie, too: Between the 2020 election and Joe Biden’s certification as the winner, Trump paid two independent auditing firms to investigate election fraud, yet tellingly never released either firm’s report.
Because his defenders fib, fudge, and finagle to satisfy Trump’s need to believe his own lies, their deceptions are uniquely sinister. When Wiles, the most powerful unelected person in the federal government, perpetuates The Big Lie, it proves that lying on Trump’s behalf is more than an occupational hazard: It’s a loyalty test imposed by the most deceitful president in US history upon everyone around him.
Lies, damned lies, and (impossible) statistics
The most common and pedantic form of political lying is “spin,” the selective framing of a politician’s or party’s talking points. A skilled spinmeister often deploys literal truths in service of a broader deceit.
For example, notice how White House officials and congressional Republicans peddle the fiction that Iran is a nuclear danger to the United States by substituting Iran’s nuclear ambitions for its nuclear capacity. Sure, Iran would like to have nuclear weapons. But intentionally conflating ambition with capacity is classical spin — a bright, shining truth designed to blind voters to a deeper, darker lie.
The Iranian case also highlights a uniquely Trumpian category of deceit: the self-contradicting double-lie.
After his June 2025 “Midnight Hammer” bombing campaign, Trump claimed to have “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities; eight short months later, he justified attacking Iran again by saying the Iranians suddenly pose a nuclear threat. Take your pick: Trump either lied then about decimating Iran’s nuclear capacity, or he’s lying now that Iran is a imminent nuclear threat.
Predictably, Trump’s incongruous claims forced defenders like toady Mark Levin, who praised the June 2025 bombings, to nonetheless make the case this year for attacking Iran again. Once you start lying on Trump’s behalf, you are compelled to update those lies to mirror Trump’s “truthiness,” to borrow the term late night comic Stephen Colbert made famous during George W. Bush’s presidency.
And then there’s type of Trump fib that defies classification — the lie designed to convince people that a demonstrably ignorant Trump claim is evidence of his special brand of genius. We refer, of course, to the fact that recent Trump lies confirm the self-proclaimed business wizard does not understand how percentages work.
We know Trump invents numbers that sound good. Throughout the 2016 campaign, he repeatedly lied about the unemployment rate in Barack Obama’s final year in office; at one point he falsely claimed that 42 percent of Americans were unemployed when the rate was roughly one-tenth that. We also know Trump has a weird numerical crutch where he frequently asserts that some positive indicators have specifically risen “92 percent” although they have not.
Because there is no limit to percentage increases, when Trump invents some rate of increase his fictions fall to fact-checkers to debunk. But after Trump started exaggerating how much his prescription drug portal was lowering drug prices, he revealed he cannot compute basic percentages. Trump boasted that drug prices dropped by mathematically impossible percentages exceeding 100 percent, including as high as 1,500 percent.
Nobody dares correct the mad king, however, so after Trump claimed he had decreased the cost of one drug by 600 percent, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rushed to defend him.
“If you have a $600 drug, and you reduce it to $10, that’s a 600 percent reduction,” Kennedy claimed in response to a question from Senate Finance Committee Democrat Elizabeth Warren about Trump’s impossible math. (The above hypothetical constitutes a roughly 98 percent reduction, but why wouldn’t RFK at least use “590 percent,” which at least gibes based on this “new” math?)
“We have lowered the price of drugs by 50, 60, 70 and 80 and 90 percent,” Trump later backtracked, pretending he understands math that most high school students can master in a few weeks. “And there’s another way of figuring, you could also say, depending on the way you phrased the statement, 400, 500, 600, 700 percent. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it.”
Finally, Trump said something true: Nobody has ever seen percentages like that because, well, they don’t exist.
Apparently, Mark Twain’s famed “lies, damned lies, and statistics” maxim — which he credited to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli — needs a new, fourth category for “impossible statistics.”
Certifiable liars
Who tells a lie can matter as much if not more than what the lie is.
However scary it is hearing Susie Wiles placate her boss by echoing The Big Lie, it’s horrifying to watch Donald Trump’s judicial appointees lie to Congress during their confirmation hearings. Not only did these nominees dodge the question of who won the 2020 election, but worse, some pretend not to understand the Constitution’s plain meaning.
Whenever Trump lackeys — including FBI Director Kash Patel — are pressed to affirm that Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, their stock response is to say that Biden “was certified” as president. The use of passive voice and the wink-wink refusal to admit Biden won the Electoral College and beat Trump in the national popular vote by 4.4 percent — thrice the 2024 margin Trump claims was a “landslide” — is their cheeky way of acknowledging that Biden was president but Trump deserved to be.
According to the judicial organization Demand Justice, all 48 of Trump’s appointees to the federal bench so far this term echoed this pat phrase to avoid incurring the ire — and potential withdrawal of their nominations — by the petulant president suffering through sensitive feel-feels about losing in 2020.
For argument’s sake, let’s stipulate that elections are complex, multi-state events about which self-serving appointees might convince themselves of false allegations. But surely future federal judges from top law schools who swear an oath to defend the Constitution would never deny clear language contained in our national charter, right?
Wrong: When asked if Trump is prohibited from seeking and serving a third presidential term, recent judicial nominees dummied up. Asked by Sen. Chris Coons, some nominees pretended that the plain, prohibitory language of the 22nd Amendment is vague or subject to interpretation.
We expect populist gadflies who love triggering the libs like Steve Bannon to assert that Trump will run for and win a third term. But hearing judicial appointees steeped in constitutional law feign confusion about the clear prohibition of third presidential terms should horrify every American.
The Constanza presidency
Like their boss, Donald Trump’s lackeys lie about pretty much everything: the state of the economy, the cost and need for the White House ballroom project, the security of shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz. Their bald-faced deceptions are designed to convince you that up is down, day is night.
Top White House economics adviser Kevin Hassett is a veritable Zen master of what might be called the “don’t believe your lying eyes” falsehood. With a giant grin, he routinely appears on television to convince viewers that high and rising prices for housing, food, or gas are lower than they are and declining, or that increased credit card spending is proof Americans are thriving amid Trumpflation.
With unmitigated confidence, Hassett passes the fabled George Costanza Test: “It’s not a lie,” Costanza famously told Jerry Seinfeld, “if you believe it.”
But do people like Hassett and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt actually believe their own lies? When they parrot Trump’s lies verbatim, especially in cases where the president’s lies are demonstrably false or numerically impossible, Trump’s lackeys must know in their hearts that they’re abasing themselves.
That’s the price of pleasing the Liar-in-Chief—a president who has reduced truth-telling in the White House by 600 percent.
Tom Schaller is professor of political science at UMBC, and author of five books, including New York Times bestseller White Rural Rage.
That’s it for now
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Imho, lying is to confuse people so they don’t believe the truth when they hear it. Fortunately, a majority of Americans are more intelligent than that.
I must admit that there are times when I ask myself if I’m living in a make believe world, or if they are. Then I read a piece such as this and become grounded in reality again.
As a malignant side effect of this administration, I notice the ethics and conduct in day-to-day life has eroded, too. I'm encountering people, both known to me and strangers, that I assumed from past experiences to be polite, kind, understanding to have become unashamedly selfish, harsh, loud, boorish, untrustworthy and indeed false. It's unfathomable to me, but a reality, how many of our fellow citizens are malleable in that way and are willing to move quickly and quietly to the dark side. The photo on top of this article seems to show a nasty characters straight out of a Gogol Farce, making good old Gollum seem benign and honest by comparison.