As the campaign intensifies, it’s getting more and more difficult to choose the top three lies each week. Trump’s rambling incoherence contains more and more lies, and more of those lies become multi-faceted. (For example, check out this week’s Gold Medal winner.)
Honorable Mention
Donald got caught in the stupid, narcissistic lie that he was invited as a guest on “Oprah” for its final historic episode. It’s a lie that he’s been telling for a long time.
He repeated this lie yet again in the wake of Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. But CNN busted him on this one:
“Trump’s claim is false. He did not appear on the last episode of ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’ in 2011, nor even in the star-studded final week of the show. Rather, Trump appeared on the show about three-and-a-half months before it ended.”
Fond of Oprah-adjacent Trump lies? There’s more in this week’s Bronze Medal fast-food related lie.
Bronze Medal:
Donald’s New Job
“I'm going to go to a McDonald's next week. I'm going to go to a McDonald's and I'm going to work the french fry job for about a half an hour. I want to see how it is.”
— Donald Trump, 09.23.2024
This one takes some unpacking.
For starters, you know Trump is lying because one of his “tells” is that he says something is going to happen “next week” or “in two weeks” when he has no intention whatsoever of doing what he says he’s going to do in that timeframe.
In the unlikely event that he does set foot in a McDonald’s kitchen, I’ll post a picture of myself eating a McDonald’s french fry in next week’s falsehood festival post.
But that’s just “Tier 1” of this web of lies.
Tier 2: Over the last several weeks, Trump has been obsessing about a line in Kamala Harris’ bio that she had worked at a McDonald’s for a summer while in college. He’s been claiming that she never worked there because it doesn’t appear on her professional resume.
“She said she worked and she grew up in terrible conditions, she worked at McDonald’s. It was such — she never worked there! And these fake news reports will never report it. They don’t want to report it because they’re fake.”
— Donald J. Trump, 09.23.2024
Harris mentions her summer working at McDonalds in her campaign bio because it’s an indication of her middle class background. But on a professional resumé or CV, no one with credentials like Kamala Harris has would include irrelevant work experience that happened 30 years earlier when applying for work in the legal profession. (I pumped gasoline for a year or so when I was 17 or 18, but it never crossed my mind to include that on my resumé when I was applying for jobs in technology three decades later.) But that’s not something Donald would know from first-hand experience.
Tier 3: Here’s where it gets complicated. It’s worth mentioning that his set of McDonald’s lies is connected with our Honorable Mention this week.
“And didn’t Oprah ask her about her time at McDonald’s? And she just sort of didn’t want to answer that one. ‘Let me not talk about that.’ Oprah said, ‘You work at McDonald’s, that’s great.’ You know, Oprah didn’t hear the end result; she never worked there. So Kamala just sort of hid under the desk, along with every other answer she gave.”
— Donald J. Trump, 09.21.2024
Again, CNN caught him in this lie as well:
“Trump’s claim that Harris dodged a question from Winfrey about working at McDonald’s is false. In reality, Winfrey never even asked Harris about working at McDonald’s. Rather, Winfrey passingly mentioned the McDonald’s job during her introduction of Harris – before the vice president walked onstage for their conversation.”
It’s noteworthy that this man with 33,000+ well documented lies of his own during his time in office and countless lies thereafter is going after his opponent for something that, even his assertions were true, would be so trivial that it’s hardly worth mentioning. That may be because he can’t really criticize Harris on important things like policy positions, because he has no policy positions of his own other than occasional off-hand proclamations at his MAGA hatefests.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.
Even in his lies, he reveals how out of touch he is with the average American. Having never had a job other than in the long, corrupt shadow of his father, he can’t even imagine what fast food workers’ jobs are really like. But Donald, the fry chef manqué, instead tries to convince us that he’s actually interested in learning about those jobs when he’s merely engaging in campaign kabuki theatre.
Tier 4: Next, maybe he’ll “level up” and claim that they named McDonald’s after him.
Silver Medal:
Donald, the Armchair Psychiatrist
At this week’s MAGA rallies, Donald has been saying that “there’s something wrong with Kamala,” the implication being that she had some mental or psychological deficiency. (On Sunday, Sept. 29, he took it a step further and called her “mentally impaired.”)
It seems like there’s a couple of things at play.
The first is to call out is the decidedly racist undertone to this lie, reinforcing to his base the old-school bigoted notion that Black people are somehow intrinsically mentally inferior to white people. It’s hardly worth dignifying this insidious attack on his political opponent with a response, other than to say how repugnant it is.
The second, though, is worth looking at in a bit more detail. It’s another of those examples of Trump taking what’s said about him and attempting to turn it around to use against Harris. He knows that folks in the MAGAsphere bubble have probably not heard him being criticized in psychological terms. But many outside that bubble have heard or read multiple qualified psychiatrists and psychologists — including his own niece, Dr. Mary Trump — describing his numerous personality disorders and psychological issues. Those analyses, based solely on his public behavior (except in the case of his niece who has had direct contact), have ranged from malignant narcissist to incompetent to dangerous.
But Donald thought he could get some traction, without evidence (and, in fact, with plenty of evidence to the contrary), that he was somehow mentally better suited to the presidency than Kamala Harris. That narcissism led him to believe that he was qualified to identify someone else’s psychological issues, despite the fact that he has never begun to acknowledge any psychological issues of his own. He might be the least introspective person I’ve ever witnessed.
But Donald Trump boasts that he knows all about “the nuclear” because he had an uncle who was an electrical engineer and a professor at MIT. We are expected to believe that knowledge somehow magically that rubbed off on him. So, perhaps he also thinks he’s qualified to make diagnoses of political opponents because his niece holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology.
By the way, in case there aren’t enough lies embedded in this Silver Medal, here’s another one. Donald Trump has boasted that his uncle — the electrical engineer — was the longest serving professor at MIT:
"You know, I had an uncle. He's the longest serving professor, Doctor John Trump, in the history of MIT, with same genes, we have genes, we're smart people, we're smart people.”
— Donald J. Trump, 01.27.2024
That, too, is untrue.
It’s all so tiresome.
Gold Medal:
Venezuelan Gangs Taking Over the State(s)
The ranking of these lies each week is admittedly subjective. But this week’s winner of the Gold Medal achieved its position because of its complexity, its duration, and its vitriol.
Donald Trump has long held a fascination with Venezuela. Over the years, he has praised and sidled up to any number of dictators — Victor Orban, Kim Jung Un, Vladimir Putin — but I get the sense he could never quite figure out whether he should befriend Nicolás Maduro or not. At one point, Trump claimed he’d flee to Venezuela if he loses the 2024 election. But he’s also spoken about Venezuelan immigrants with a particular venom.
Trump has griped for a long time about the influx of Venezuelan refugees entering the U.S. But lately, Donald Trump’s false claims about a supposed Venezuelan gang activity — specifically in Colorado — are growing even more fantastical.
“You know, the governor’s a Democrat, and he’s a radical left Democrat, and he’s not too popular right now because they’re going to take over a lot more than Aurora. They’re gonna go through Colorado, take over the whole damn state by the time they’re finished, unless I become President. They won’t last long. ”
— Donald J. Trump, 09.24.2024, Savannah, GA
He followed that sweeping statement up the next day on the campaign trail, with more of his imagined details:
“We wouldn't have hostile takeovers of Springfield, Ohio, Aurora, Colorado, where they are actually going in with massive machine gun-type equipment. They are going in with guns that are beyond even military scope, and they are taking over apartment buildings. They’re taking over real estate. They’re in the real estate development business. Congratulations. These are … in that case, people from Venezuela. Young street gang members that were sent here by the Venezuelan government.”
— Donald J. Trump, 09.25.2024, Mint Hill, NC
Let’s put some context around these wild accusations. There have been several arrests of Venezuela nationals at an apartment building in Aurora, CO, that has had a lengthy history of crime and disrepair. But police and city officials have explicitly stated that, so far, they have come to no conclusions as to gang affiliations.
"There's no question there have been some issues, but it's been so dramatically exaggerated that it’s the entire city being overrun by criminal or gang activity. That couldn’t be further from the truth."
— Aurora Republican Mayor Mike Coffman
Even residents of the building in question have spoken out against the rumors that the Venezuelan gang has “taken over” their building.
But first-hand accounts from local Republicans and building residents haven’t prevented Trump from leaping to the most inflammatory conclusions.
On Sept. 18, Donald rolled out his standard claim when he has no intention to do anything that he will visit Aurora “in the next two weeks,” which again is a virtual guarantee that he will not visit Aurora anytime soon. It’s unclear what such a visit would accomplish, other than adding fuel to the fire.
Trump’s particular disdain for Venezuelan immigrants may be because he knows that the sanctions he imposed on Venezuela while he was in office are partially responsible for that country’s dire economic conditions which, in turn, triggered the surge in refugees from that country into the U.S.:
“The Trump White House was warned [by the Department of Homeland Security] that harsh sanctions on Venezuela could accelerate that country’s economic collapse and speed an exodus of millions of migrants to neighboring nations, according to three current and former U.S. government officials …
“The Trump administration nevertheless imposed some of the harshest economic penalties in U.S. history on Venezuela in response to documented human rights abuses, extrajudicial killings and corruption by the regime of dictator Nicolás Maduro. The sanctions are fiercely defended by proponents, who say they were a necessary response to one of the most brutal crackdowns on civilians in two decades.
“Today, however, Maduro remains in power, and a surge in Venezuelan immigrants has emerged as a flash point in the U.S. presidential election. Though Venezuelan mass migration to the United States only began after President Biden took office, concern among Trump officials about the sanctions’ potential effects, including on migration, was more extensive than previously known, according to interviews with more than two dozen current and former U.S. officials.”
— Washington Post, 07.26.2024
Trump is aiming these lies at the most xenophobic among his base, many of whom wouldn’t be able to find Venezuela on a map. I’d venture a guess that they couldn’t tell you anything about Venezuela other than what they’ve heard directly from Donald Trump. But he’s more than willing and eager to stoke his followers’ fears for his own political gain, no matter the consequences and no matter that what he says is only connected with reality by the slenderest of threads.