Transcription
So tonight I want to talk about Donald Trump and the truth, or more accurately, Donald Trump and lies. And I kick off this discussion tonight because of what happened last week. Just one of his many lies of the week, but one in particular that is worth paying attention to. And that is his lying about the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the woman he fired because she produced jobs numbers that the president didn't like. Here is what the president had to say about the reasons for firing her. And just look at the number of lies within 45 seconds.
"Announcing a new statistician sometime over the next 3, 4 days. We had no confidence. I mean, the numbers were ridiculous what she announced, but that was just one negative number. All of the numbers seem to be great. And so, we'll see how that comes out. And if you remember, just before the election, this woman came out with these phenomenal numbers on Biden's uh economy, phenomenal numbers. And then right after the election, they announced that those numbers were wrong. And that's what they did the other day. So it's a scam in my opinion. My opinion is just it's just additional scam."
So what is the significance of his lying about this particular person who works in the administration, and what is his relationship overall with the truth? Well, if we go back to the first Trump administration, the Washington Post, over those four years, documented 30,573 lies. And what the Washington Post also found is that the lies accelerated during the latter part of that administration, with almost half of those 30,573 lies occurring within the last year alone.
You might remember at the very beginning of the Trump administration, some of the very first lies were, believe it or not, about the size of the crowd at the inauguration. Here's Donald Trump lying about the crowd at the inauguration.
"It looked, honestly, it looked like a million and a half people. Whatever it was, it was. But it went all the way back to the Washington Monument. And I turn on, and by mistake, I get this network, and it showed an empty field and it said, 'We drew 250,000 people.' Now, that's not bad, but it's a lie. We had 250,000 people literally around, you know, in the little bowl that we constructed. That was 250,000 people. The rest of the, you know, 20 block area all the way back to the Washington Monument was packed."
Now, there are a lot of things that are notable about that particular scene. What was most striking to me at the time, I was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Those lies were told by Donald Trump at the CIA, standing in front of a wall where there are stars emblematic of the people that have died in the service of the intelligence agency, many of whom the American people don't know because their work was kept secret. That is hallowed ground. That is sacred ground within the CIA. So there is Donald Trump on sacred ground, lying, of all things, about the size of the crowd during the inauguration.
Now, that particular speech was problematic for a lot of other reasons as well. It was a highly partisan address and had no place at the CIA headquarters. But nevertheless, this was just the beginning of Donald Trump and his many lies. They got much more serious, of course, during the course of that administration. And at one point, I remember tweeting out something to the effect of, "Does he even know fact from fiction? Or is there something even more insidious at work?"
But looking back on it, I realize now I wasn't really asking the right question. The question with Donald Trump is not whether he knows he's lying, not whether he knows fact from fiction, but rather whether he cares about whether something is true or not. And I think the fact of the matter, after observing him for these many years, is that there are only two kinds of statements in Donald Trump's world. There are statements that are helpful to him, and there are statements that are unhelpful to him. And he will never pronounce statements that are unhelpful to him. He will always only pronounce statements he believes are in his personal self-interest. The truth just doesn't matter.
The only other, I think, relevant division in the world for Donald Trump is he divides the world into winners and losers. And in his view, only a loser tells the truth if the truth doesn't serve their interest. And in this respect, I think Trump also suffers from a kind of blindness. That is, Donald Trump believes everyone lies the way he does. He's just being open about it. The fact of the matter is, he is a quite uniquely talented pathological liar. That puts him really in a very separate category. But what makes it all the more dangerous is when that liar is at the center of our government and the most powerful person in the world, because those lies can be downright dangerous.
If we flash forward to Trump 2.0, we see Trump lying, his cabinet members lying time after time after time in terms of the intelligence community, hearkening back to that first visit of Donald Trump in his first administration. You have Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, the person at the top of the intelligence agencies. And when a report is produced by the intelligence community by objective uh analysts, and it contradicts the president's preferred narrative, in one particular case, his narrative about a gang, a Nicaraguan gang called Trend Dee Aragua, when it contradicted Trump's claim that they were essentially controlled by the Nicaraguan government, dispatched by the Nicaraguan government, when it contradicted the president, and therefore his immigration policy and the legal basis they were using to deport or render people outside the country, Tulsi Gabbard basically, through her chief of staff, told the analysts to rewrite the conclusions of that report, and then she fired people involved in the production of that report.
Now, we have seen other lies from Telsey Gabbard as well. Most recently, Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe have been lying about the Russia investigation. And they have been pushing out many lies with respect to the Russia investigation, but two in particular. They've been pushing out lies that because the intelligence community believed that the Russians didn't actually go into voting machines in 2016 and change the votes, that means that the intelligence committee's analysis was that the Russians didn't prefer Donald Trump or didn't interfere or didn't denigrate Hillary Clinton. But these are not the same thing. The fact that the Russians didn't interfere with the voting machines to change votes doesn't mean that they didn't interfere in the election with a social media troll farm in St. Petersburg pushing out material that was derogatory of Hillary Clinton. It doesn't mean they didn't hack the DNC server and leak Clinton and Democratic Party emails in an effort to help tip the election towards Donald Trump, because of course, that's exactly what the Russians did. But by conflating those two things, these top intelligence leaders are lying to the public.
They're also lying to the public about part of John Durham, a special counsel's investigation. They're lying about his conclusion. And they're using lies about his conclusion to go after intelligence community officials like James Clapper and John Brennan, who served during the Obama administration. And they're using those lies to investigate and potentially prosecute people that are on their enemies list.
But of course, it's not just the intelligence community or Telsey Gabbard. One other cabinet official that deserves a very special mention is RFK Jr. You'll remember his early lies about the measles outbreak. Here's RFK.
"There have been four measles outbreaks this year. In this country, last year there were 16. So, it's not unusual. We have measles outbreaks every year."
And more recently, and perhaps even more dangerously, here are his lies about the vaccines, the type of vaccines that were so important in fighting the co-virus.
"Most of these shots are for flu or COVID. But as the pandemic showed us, mRNA vaccines don't perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract."
And RFK Jr. is using those lies to defund the production of vaccines that can save millions of lives. One scientist called it perhaps the most dangerous lie he'd ever seen.
And it's not just the president. It's not just cabinet officials. Let's look at what Republicans in Congress have done. They wanted to make the claim that their big ugly bill was paid for. And so they lied about it. They wanted to persuade the American people that they were not raising the deficit debt by trillions of dollars. So what did they do? They made a change in the accounting. They said instead of using current law and what current law would say about any changes to current law and the impact on the deficit and debt, we'll use something called current policy. Meaning that if a tax cut is going to expire and we extend it, it doesn't cost anything. That is just a different form of a great big lie.
But that lie too has consequences because it means that your kids and my kids and our grandkids are going to pay more on their credit cards. They're going to pay more for their mortgage. They're going to owe more. We're borrowing from them. And that big lie by Senate Republicans and House Republicans merely covers up the very expensive truth that they've blown a hole in the deficit. And these have real-world consequences. These lies.
Now, some of the most pernicious coming from the president himself involve, it won't surprise you, January 6th. And the effort by the president to try to reinvent history, to try to push out the falsehood that January 6th was just an ordinary tourist day, or that it was peaceful and loving, when the reality is that hundreds of police officers were beaten. There were massive efforts to break into the Capitol, desecrate the Capitol, and try to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power. And indeed, the Trump lies about January 6th are so pervasive now, they become such a gospel within the GOP that you can't get confirmed for a position in the administration unless you're willing to lie about January 6th. Unless you're willing to obfuscate even who won the election in 2020.
Here are Trump nominees before the Judiciary Committee or other committees, unable to answer the very simple question, did Joe Biden win the 2020 election?
"Are you prepared to say today, under oath, without reservation, that Donald Trump lost the presidential contest to Joe Biden in 2020?"
"Ranking Member Durban, President Biden is the president of the United States. He was duly sworn in and he is the president of the United States. There was a peaceful transition of power. President Trump left office and was overwhelmingly elected in 2024."
"Do you have any doubts that Joe Biden had the majority of votes, electoral votes necessary to be elected president in 2020?"
"You know, Senator, all I can tell you as a prosecutor is from my firsthand experience, and I accept the results. I accept, of course, that Joe Biden is president of the United States."
So, this lie is such a necessary prerequisite to the Trump administration. It means that anyone willing to tell the truth will either be the subject of persecution, prosecution, but will certainly never be appointed to any position of responsibility in the Trump administration. It is just one litmus test of the liar-in-chief.
And this brings us to the most recent lies about the statistician, the head of statistics at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Why is Donald Trump lying about her? Well, clearly he didn't like the jobs report. Clearly he would like to have the country believe that his on-again, off-again tariff policy is doing nothing but driving the economy, when in fact it is killing jobs in the country. And in fact, what we have seen is that job growth has been absolutely stagnant. Uh, in fact, the worst numbers since the pandemic. And if you go back before the pandemic, you'd have to go to the Great Recession to find worse jobs numbers. Donald Trump doesn't want you to know that. So, he'll fire anyone who tells you the truth.
This means that the American people cannot trust the administration. They can't trust the intelligence community because its leaders are liars. They can't trust the administration because the president is a liar. They can't trust health officials like RFK because he is a liar, because they are all willing to lie in order to serve Donald Trump.
So what can be done about this? And the answer is very simple, even as it is very difficult. And that is, with every lie, we must relentlessly confront them with the truth. When they say January 6th was a peaceful tourist day, we show them this. When they say they have respect for law enforcement officers, we show them this.
"I need public support."
When they claim that it was a loving day on January 6th, we show them this. When they make false claims about jobs numbers or vaccines, we bring out the experts, the scientists to tell the country the truth. And yes, it's a difficult battle. It is particularly difficult in social media where it is said that a lie could travel halfway around the world before the truth puts its running shoes on. But that is no excuse for failing to try to push out the truth in every way we can.
The social media companies are obviously not helping. They've done away with a lot of their fact-checkers. They're now reliant on algorithms, and they set those algorithms to tolerate the kind of lies they're happy to hear. If you've been on Twitter recently and looked at the feed on Twitter, you can see the multiplication of the most ugly, prejudiced, bigoted lies you can find anywhere.
So right now, the truth is under assault, and it is up to all of us to push back in every way we can, by talking to our friends and neighbors, by writing letters to the editor, by drawing on those who are experts in our community, by pushing out relentlessly the truth in the face of this fire hose of falsehood. There is simply no alternative.
Among the most corrosive things Donald Trump has done to our democracy has been his relentless assault on the truth. If there is no common basis of fact, if there is no shared experience to draw upon, then how are we to determine what policy should be or who should govern? If we can't trust the jobs numbers, then how do we know whether an economic policy is working? If we can't trust health officials, how do we know whether to take safely a vaccine? You simply cannot know.
Now, this is part of the dictator's playbook. We see others controlling information, whether it is Putin in Russia, Erdogan in Turkey, or despots anywhere around the world. They believe if they control access to information and they can flood that information with lies, they can keep people in the dark. But history and experience have shown you can only hide the truth so long. And the harder we push out the facts, the faster we can get through this period of utter truthlessness by the administration.