There was a tweet on Twitter (or is it an X on X?) that showed Donald Trump talking with his nose getting bigger and bigger. It has long been definitively established that Donald Trump is truth challenged (i.e. a seemingly non-stop lie machine). Those who point out the lies are usually then accused by Trump supporters of having Trump Derangement Syndrome, a phrase intending to define the person being attacked but which actually defines the attacker using the phrase.
But here is some news about Trump lies. There is a trend.
Trump says the same lies over and over and when it has been proven they are lies he…simply repeats them over and over again and again.
In a speech last week to the National Guard Association of the United States, former President Donald Trump claimed that he was the president who “created” the Veterans Choice health care program, and got it “passed in Congress,” after others had wanted to do so “for 57 years.”
In reality, President Barack Obama was the president who signed the program into law in 2014. The law Trump signed in 2018, the VA MISSION Act, expanded the Veterans Choice program but didn’t create it.
I could fact-check this Trump lie half-asleep – because he’s been telling it for more than six years.
Trump’s lying is most exceptional in its relentlessness, a never-ending avalanche of wrongness that can bury even the most devoted fact-checkers. But it’s also notable for its repetitiveness. He has found his hits, and he’ll keep playing them no matter how many times they are debunked.
As Trump enters the post-Labor Day sprint of his 2024 campaign for the presidency, his commentary is filled with many of the same false claims he made as president from 2017 to 2021. He’s even repeating some of the false claims he used during his 2016 presidential campaign.
As a fact-check reporter for CNN, I watch or read the transcript of every public appearance by Trump and his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. While Harris’ campaign remarks to date have been heavy on thematic rhetoric and light on assertions of fact, with a smattering of false or misleading claims, Trump’s 2024 interviews and speeches are littered with old falsehoods I’ve come to call “the repeats” – assertions I have fact-checked as false over and over for years.
Dale lists some of the lies that Trump repeats again and again (and again) and writes:
Trump’s regular false claims of a “rigged” 2020 election echo his language from both his 2016 campaign and 2020 campaign. (The claims were baseless then and are baseless now.)
And less importantly, when Trump declared in June, July and again on Thursday that he had been named “Man of the Year” in Michigan long before he entered politics, it was the third straight presidential election he had told this silly lie he debuted in 2016. (There is no evidence the award even exists, let alone that Trump, who has never lived in Michigan, received it.)
This does work for Trump, since he uses repetition:
Nobody really knows how much of Trump’s deployment of old lies is strategic and how much is mere force of habit. Regardless, his persistence produces a clear benefit for him.
News outlets tend to focus on new material. While some outlets may be inclined to fact-check a false Trump claim the first, second, third or even 10th time he utters it, they are far less likely to devote precious resources to a claim on the 100th or 150th utterance – especially because he is constantly mixing in dozens of new lies that require time and resources to address. And so, by virtue of shameless perseverance, Trump often manages to outlast most of the media’s willingness to correct any particular falsehood, eventually getting that claim into news coverage and social media clips nearly uncorrected.
That’s not to say his lying is an unmitigated victory.
Dale notes that many polls indicate many American’s don’t trust Trump as he delivers a medley of his favorite untruths at campaign rallies, on social media and to the mainstream media. He ends with this:
So as long as Trump or any other major political figure keeps reviving their past nonsense, we should keep debunking that nonsense. Even if we already did it eight years ago.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.