It’s been difficult to narrow the lies down to only three each week, and this week is no exception. His collection of follow-up pet stranger-danger lies didn’t even make the top three:
Instead of dialing things back, his lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are metastasizing:
He continues to double down on the racist lie about dogs and cats being eaten by Haitian immigrants.
He said he’d be visiting Springfield “in the near future.” (Nobody wants him to visit there. Also, he uses the standard phrases “in a few weeks,” “in two weeks,” and “in the near future” when he has no plan or intention to fulfill his promise.)
He also claimed he’d be killed when he goes to Springfield, OH.
Somebody please make that make sense.
Honorable Mention
“You’ll Never See Your Children Again!”
On Wednesday, Trump put forth a variation on his recent theme of instilling fear in the parents of small children. What’s particularly odd about his Wednesday prevarication festival is that he made it geographically specific.
His previous lies were more general. In any school in America, according to Trump, your child could bid you goodbye in the morning and come back a different gender.
But this recent appeal to New York state voters, delivered at Wednesday’s rally at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, NY, incorporated public transportation. He started with what he apparently regards as heartwarming memories of his own childhood, but things quickly took a morbidly dark turn:
“[M]y parents would drop me off at a subway and I’d go to Union Turnpike, or I’d go to wherever. They had no fear that I was going to be disappearing!
“They would take me to a subway, put me on, and say, ‘Bye darling, bye.’ If you do that today, you have about a 75% chance that you’ll never see your child again.”
— Donald J. Trump, Sept. 18, 2024
I’m not sure if this is one of the most pressing issues in America or even in the greater New York City metropolitan area. But, like so much that spews forth from Don the Con’s gaping maw, it’s pretty difficult to discern any logic behind a lie like this. Is he just attempting to bolster his position that our cities have all become urban hellscapes? And, if so, who is he trying to win over with that reasoning?
Unsurprisingly, in a related Trump-adjacent lie, both Marjorie Taylor Greene and Elon Musk posted on social media that a bomb was going to explode at the Nassau Coliseum rally. Police described that as “an unfounded rumor.” And do I need to say that no bomb exploded? Or even existed?
The only bomb at that rally was Trump’s performance.
Bronze Medal:
He’ll Tax Some Things That Don’t Exist
Stoking fear in the uninformed during his campaign stop in Flint, Michigan, on Monday, Trump repeated his lie that China was building car factories in Mexico. He promised to impose a 200% tariff on any cars imported into the United States from those Chinese factories. In August, he had promised a 100% tariff on those non-existent cars from non-existent factories, so I guess now he’s twice as serious about imposing taxes on things that don’t exist.
Compounding those lies, Trump also claimed that Kamala Harris, if she were to be elected, would make sure that any electric cars sold in the U.S. would come from China and, therefore, manufacturing jobs in the auto industry would disappear. The problem with that collection of lies is that all of the big three automakers (GM, Ford, and Stelantis) are already quite successfully manufacturing and selling electric cars and trucks here in the United States. Honda already has EV plants in Ohio, with plans for expansion. Volkswagen opened an EV assembly plant in Tennessee in 2022.
Does Trump really think all those manufacturers are going to cede their ground in the EV market to China, whose cars don’t even have a dealer distribution network in the U.S.? Does he think that a president has the unilateral authority to cease all manufacturing in an entire business sector?
I’m kidding. Of course he doesn’t think that. He’s lying.
Silver Medal:
Victim in His Own Mind
Donald Trump has a few traits that regularly make themselves evident to anyone who’s paying attention:
Donald Trump loves to play the victim.
Donald Trump never encountered a conspiracy theory he didn’t embrace.
Evidence-free lies are his specialty.
This week’s multi-dimensional Silver Medal-winning lie has been developing in the weeks since the Sept. 10 presidential debate, and it fulfills all three of those traits. Trump and the Trump-adjacent cronies have been desperate to distract from Trump’s objectively disastrous performance at the debate. So they’ve concocted a conspiracy theory both to lure people away from remembering the specifics of the debate and to plant seeds of doubt about the legitimacy of the debate itself.
Out of an abundance of caution, the Trump team started floating parts of this conspiracy theory on social media, accusing — in advance of the debate. Weeks before the debate even happened, the strategy was to criticize the network, disparage the moderators, and claim that Trump would never be treated fairly.
Then, in the wake of Trump’s high-decibel debate buffoonery, they’ve been spewing the lie that ABC News had provided the debate questions to Kamala Harris and her team in advance of the debate, presenting no evidence whatsoever. They waved the magic bullshit wand and concocted a “whistleblower” who supposedly had inside information about this imaginary debate subterfuge.
Not surprisingly, ABC News has strongly denied that any such shenanigans took place. The Trump team provided no evidence and no details.
But little by little, the lie started to attract attention on social media and in some newsrooms, only not in the way that the Trump team had hoped. It was all just a little too convenient. There were no specifics involved — where this happened, how this happened, who this phantom whistleblower might be. No details whatsoever.
Trump and the Trumpsters realized they were caught in this ridiculous lie, so what did they do? Did they issue an apology? Did they admit they had created this story out of whole cloth?
Hell, no. They compounded the lie. They said that the whistleblower had mysteriously been killed in a car crash, implying that some dastardly Democrat was inexplicably responsible for a non-existent fatal car wreck. Of course, once again, they provided no details — where this imaginary car crash was supposed to have happened, what was the nature of the crash, how to get ahold of police reports. Nothing.
Now that the non-existent whistleblower and car crash victim was deceased, there would no longer be any reason to attempt to protect this person’s identity. But protect it they did. Or, I should say, they just stopped talking about it.
But the lie had already traveled around the world before the truth had had its first sip of morning coffee. The damage was done, and that’s all they cared about. A certain segment of the population will now go to their graves swearing that this happened.
If you have any doubt that there are people who will still believe this kind of lie, do a quick Google search of “Vince Foster and Hillary Clinton.”
Gold Medal:
The “Shoot Yourself in the Foot” Lie
Where do I even begin with this one?
Ever the hero of his own narrative, Trump pretended to have quelled the civil unrest in Minneapolis after the murder of George Floyd by a group of policemen thugs. He appeared on “Gutfeld!” on Fox News to elaborate on a lie he’s been telling for a while:
“[Walz] called up years ago, I was in the White House, and he said, ‘My house is being surrounded by people with American flags. I said, ‘Is that a good thing or a bad thing?’ He said, ‘I think they’re going to attack me.’ This was during the riots and everything else. They were MAGA people. They like the American flag, alright? And they also had Trump [sic] and I said, ‘How do you know?’ ‘There were about 15,000,’ he said. He said, ‘Could you put out a word, like, that I’m your friend?’ I don’t even know him. But that’s the only time I ever spoke to him.
“And if you look back long ago, tweets, before Truth hit, tweets, I put out a statement, ‘He’s a good man, the governor, he’s on our side, it’s’ … I didn’t know him, but I didn’t want him to get hurt. And everybody put down their flags and they left. He said it was a miracle. He said it was a miracle.”
— Donald J. Trump, 09.18.2014, Fox News
There’s so damn much to unpack here.
At its core, this anecdote-that-never-happened was Trump’s attempt at damage control. When Kamala Harris announced that Tim Walz would be her running mate, Trump and his campaign instantly went into high gear to attack Walz. They criticized his response to the civil unrest in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
But a few weeks ago, a tape and transcript surfaced of Trump praising Governor Walz’s response at the time:
“I think Tim is on the phone now, Tim Walz. Again, I was very happy with the last couple of days. Tim you called up big numbers and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins.”
— Donald J. Trump, 06.01.2020, phone call with U.S. Governors
Of course, Trump celebrated violence. Leopards don’t change their spots.
In response to that new revelation, Trump had to go on offense and, as usual, double down on his previous lies.
But back to Trump’s self-aggrandizing tale of heroism.
In June of 2020, there were contemporaneous reports of a peaceful protest outside the governor’s mansion in support of Black Lives Matter. But there is no reporting at the time of any gathering of 15,000 flag-waving Trump supporters around the governor’s mansion for any reason. It never happened.
There was, however, an anti-vaxxer protest at the governor’s mansion in April of 2020 — two months before the murder of George Floyd — organized by a coalition of gun rights groups. (I have no explanation how or why gun rights groups would suddenly take an interest in epidemiology, but that’s perhaps a rabbit hole to pursue at some other time.)
It appears that Trump has conflated a few events, as he is wont to do lately. I haven’t been able to verify that he had any influence in calling off the April 2020 anti-vax protest, but he certainly had an influence in supporting it.
But here’s an interesting twist to keep an eye on down the road. In the Fox News appearance, Trump was trying to frame himself as being on the side of law and order. He claimed that, with a single tweet, he convinced these perfectly lovely flag-waving but also terribly scary and threatening MAGA supporters to disband.
As the Washington Post and other news outlets have reported, with that statement on Fox News, he completely undermined his own defense in the pending January 6 case. Somehow, he could magically disband his supporters in Minneapolis with a single tweet six months earlier, yet he has claimed he had no ability to disband the actual violent January 6 mob in Washington D.C. — the very crowd he had cheered on and stirred up hours earlier.
I’m exhausted.
Yeah, somehow I caught that Gutfield episode, having never seen or heard about it previously; the show, I mean. Oh, and as many are aware, a Narcissist ALWAYS is the Victim. Perfectly nailed. Get some shuteye, Theo, so you can continue with your fantastic news reporting. Love it. Thank you. (I told you my Third Cousin us named Theo, right? He is almost 8 months old).