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While it’s certainly not a title any politician should gloat about, Donald Trump will perhaps go down in history as — among other infamous things — being the biggest liar to ever take the White House.
Even for a presidency marked by some history-making moments, it was Trump’s questionable relationship with the truth that became his hallmark, to the point where fact-checkers estimated he had told over 30,000 untruths during his four-year term.
Now, Trump’s history of lying has reentered the public conversation as he continues his bid for the presidency, with his race to the White House again being defined by enough lies to send Pinocchio into cardiac arrest. While his campaign has doled out lies at a break-neck pace across the board, there are a few untruths that Trump appears to be giving particular airtime, many of which he reiterated during a disastrous impromptu press conference last week.
This dumpster fire took place at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and saw the former President spout even more lies, leaving fact-checkers working overtime. The presser was home to some of Trump’s favorite fibs, which he has repeated throughout his campaign. Here are six of them, from comments about January 6 to the size of Trump’s rally crowds.
“Nobody was killed on January 6.”
Trump claimed during his press conference that “nobody was killed” during the attack on the capitol on January 6, 2021. This, of course, is patently false, since it has been reported that five people died during the riots launched by Trump supporters who opposed Joe Biden’s election victory. Trump supporters and police officers were among those who were killed. Regardless of the facts, Trump has made this claim on multiple occasions since the events of January 6.
“Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me. If you look at Martin Luther King when he did his speech … we had more.”
Beyond the sheer unbelievability of comparing himself to Martin Luther King, the content of Trump’s claims about crowd sizes is also, you guessed it, a lie.
Trump’s claim that the size of his crowd at his January 6 speech outnumbered that of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 is untrue, since an estimated 250,000 people attended the latter’s famous address compared to the estimated 10,000 that assembled for Trump. Of course, Trump has a history of inflating his crowd sizes dating back to his inauguration, so this is unsurprising.
Biden withdrawing from the presidential race “seems to me actually unconstitutional.”
Doubling down on a claim he first made following Joe Biden’s exit from the presidential race, Trump suggested yet again that the president’s stepping down is “unconstitutional.” In reality, there is nothing in the constitution that prevents Biden from withdrawing from the race, and nothing that forbids the Democratic Party from appointing Kamala Harris as its nominee.
“There will be a peaceful transfer of power. As there was last time.”
As part of broader lies to minimize the horrors of January 6, Trump claimed there was “a peaceful transfer of power” when Biden was elected president in 2020. Of course, the pro-Trump riots in response to certifying Biden as president were anything but peaceful, so Trump’s version of events is false.
On Kamala Harris’ race: “Whether it’s Indian or Black, I think it’s very disrespectful of both.”
Continuing his attack on Kamala Harris’ race, Trump claimed that his opponent identifying as both of her races is “disrespectful.” Not only is Harris’ race not for Trump, a white man, to decide, but the idea that she “became Black” is obviously false. Harris’ father is Jamaican, and she has long said she identifies with both sides of her heritage as an African American and an Indian.
“Abortion has become much less of an issue.”
Adding to his sentiments regarding abortion rights and the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, Trump claimed that “abortion has become much less of an issue” among voters, before saying Democrats allow people to “do abortions… even after birth.”
The claim that abortion is not a factor in this year’s election is false, since it was named the top election issue for 1 in 8 voters. Obviously, his repeated claims about abortions after birth are false, since the procedure by its nature does not involve ending the life of a baby that has already been born.