February 10, 2026
To stop exposing them allows them to metastasize.
By now, most Americans are used to Trump and his administration’s daily blizzard of lies. They aren’t simply exaggerations or mistakes. They are part of a sustained attack on the major pillars of American democracy—the courts, the media, the schools and universities, museums and cultural institutions, even sports—to intimidate people into submission so he can rule without guardrails, constitutional protections, checks and balances—or the truth.
In 2018, Steve Bannon, once Trump’s key political adviser, said that the president’s major adversary is the press and “the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” When reporters expose his lies, or ask tough questions, Trump calls them “fake news.”
Trump emerged on the public stage in 1973 when he lied about a federal government report documenting that he discriminated against Blacks in his apartment buildings. It was well-known among New York gossip columnists and reporters that Trump lied about his wealth, his sexual affairs, and his business activities. From 2011 to 2016, Trump was a leading proponent of the discredited “birther” conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
He began his first presidential campaign with a lie that undocumented immigrants were responsible for a disproportionate share of violent crime—a claim he’s repeated often. “We looked at homicides, sexual assaults, violent crimes, property crimes, traffic and drug violations,” Michael Light, a University of Wisconsin sociologist, told USA Today. “And what we find across the board is that the undocumented tend to have lower rates of crimes with all of these types of offenses.”
Trump lied about the size of the crowd at his inauguration in 2017, which spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway justified by calling them “alternative facts.” (They weren’t facts, or even a different interpretation of facts. They were lies.) He lied about his 2019 phone call with Volodymr Zelensky, pledging military aid for Ukraine in exchange for coming up with dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden. He lied when he sent federal troops to Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Minneapolis by claiming they were overwhelmed by rising crime and violence when, in fact, crime in those cities has been declining. He lied that Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating pets in Ohio.
Lying has become so normal within the Trump administration that his top aides lie on his behalf, even when the lie is transparent. In his recent Davos speech, for example, Trump mixed up Greenland and Iceland four times. That was not a lie, just Trump’s own mental confusion. But then president secretary Karoline Leavitt lied about what the entire world saw and heard. “No he didn’t,” Leavitt wrote on X in response to a reporter who accurately describing Trump’s confusion. “His written remarks referred to Greenland as a ‘piece of ice’ because that’s what it is.”
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The number of Trump lies have probably multiplied dramatically in his second term. He appears to believe he can get away with breaking the law, defying the courts, and lying on a regular basis.
Here are just a few examples of Trump’s (and his top aides’) lies during his second term, particularly over the past few weeks.
1. He lied about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, at first claiming he hardly knew him.
2. He lied about his reasons for invading Venezuela and kidnapping its president, first claiming that it was about drug trafficking when it was clearly about oil.
3. He lied about ending seven or eight wars (the number varies), for which he claimed to deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.
4. He lied that Renee Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.” Vice-President J.D. Vance doubled down with his own lie, that Good “aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator. Nobody debates that.”
5. He lied about Alex Pretti, calling the 37-year-old ICU nurse who was fatally shot by Border Patrol agents an “agitator, and perhaps, insurrectionist,” and “out of control.” Stephen Miller lied when he described Pretti as a “would-be assassin.” Miller and HHS Secretary Kristi Noem called Pretti a “domestic terrorist.” Her agency lied that Pretti was impeding an operation and “brandishing” a weapon.
6. Trump lied that the US now has “the best economy, ever!” and called the affordability crisis a “hoax,” perpetrated by Democrats. He said grocery prices were “way down,” although they had increased. In January, Trump lied that gasoline is “at $1.99 in many states,” when the lowest average price in any state was $2.34 and the national average was $2.78. He pledged to reduce the price of prescription drugs by between 500 percent to 3,000 percent, which is mathematically impossible.
7. Trump lied that “the people of Canada like” his proposal to make Canada the 51st state, but polls reveal that 90 percent of Canadians oppose the idea.
8. Trump lied that white South Africans are targets of genocide, his excuse for allowing 59 Afrikaners to resettle here as refugees.
9. Trump has lied repeatedly about the “stolen” or “rigged” 2020 election, a lie that led to the insurrection at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. On his first day back in office last year, he pardoned, or commuted the prison sentences of all 1,500-plus people charged with those crimes. Trump lied that “the people that went down there, they had no guns.” In truth, many rioters had guns. He’s lied about his role in the January 6 mutiny and his failed efforts to overturn the election. He’s trying to lay the groundwork to invoke the Insurrection Act to send federal troops to disrupt upcoming elections.
Trump’s lies come so often each day that it is hard to keep track. It isn’t sufficient for news outlet to publish stories that allow Trump to spew lies and then note that some of his statements are “without evidence” or cite an expert to contradict him. These are scattershot anecdotes, making it difficult to see the larger pattern.
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During his first term, The Washington Post compiled a daily list of his lies throughout his entire first term. The Post identified 30,573 lies during that period—an average of 21 lies every day he was in office. The Post is no longer in the business of holding Trump to account.
The Times (which kept a tally of Trump’s first-term lies for only one year) could valuably restore a daily scorecard of his lies (and those of his top aides) in coordination with the Associated Press, Politiact, Reuters, and ProPublica. It could count the number of lies each day, each week, and cumulatively over his remaining time in office, categorize them into different topics, and highlight egregious examples of major falsehoods. It could distribute the scorecard to every subscribing media outlet and make it publicly available on its website.
A daily scorecard would drive Trump crazy. He would certainly threaten news organizations with lawsuits or other forms of intimidation. But if there were ever a time when we needed the news media to challenge the daily, deliberate, and increasing dishonesty of the nation’s president, it is now, when our democracy is at risk.
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