‘We’re watching mass delusion happen’: Trump’s return to White House brings cascade of lies
Donald Trump had been US president again for less than 15 minutes when he made his first factually dubious claim.
“The vicious, violent and unfair weaponisation of the justice department and our government will end,” he said early in his inaugural address. There is no evidence that former president Joe Biden ordered the justice department to prosecute Trump and no violence took place.
The return of Trump to the White House for his second presidential term is also the return of what one critic called “America’s liar-in-chief”. His first week in office brought a cascade of false and misleading claims about immigration, the economy, electric vehicles, the Panama Canal, his election defeat in 2020 and the January 6 insurrection that followed.
Some see the brazen embrace of mendacity as both habitual and strategic.
“It’s a continuation of Donald Trump’s brand,” said Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill. “He knows that sunlight is the best disinfectant so he’s going to continue to lie to mask what he’s doing. If you can undermine institutions and credible sources of information, you can get away with lying and deceiving people. We’re watching that mass delusion happen right before our eyes in the Trump administration 2.0.”
During his first term as president, Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims over four years, according to a count by the Washington Post. He maintained a similar pace during last year’s presidential election campaign. On Monday, as he was sworn in for a second time at the US Capitol in Washington, he made clear it will be business as usual.
Trump said in his inaugural address the US government “fails to protect our magnificent, law-abiding American citizens but provides sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals, many from prisons and mental institutions that have illegally entered our country from all over the world”. In truth there is no evidence other countries are sending their criminals or the mentally ill across the border.
The 47th president also promised to direct his cabinet to defeat “record inflation” and rapidly bring down costs and prices. Inflation peaked at 9.1% under Biden in June 2022 but has been much higher in other historical periods, such as a more than 14% rate in 1980.
But while fact-checkers continued to hold Trump to account, Republicans seemed less willing than ever to correct the record while rightwing influencers were eager to amplify his falsehoods in what is now a fragmented media ecosystem. The leaders of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and X attended his inauguration; Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that the platform will abandon third party fact-checking.
Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist and media relations consultant, said: “If there’s any lasting impact from Donald Trump’s time on the political stage it’s that we live in a world now where you can just make up your own facts and truth is how ever you decide to to bend it.
“There are content creators and content machines that exist solely for the purpose of laundering anything that Donald Trump says and making it true to a certain degree. It’s a play off the [Richard] Nixon quote: if the president does it, it is legal; well, if the president says it, it’s true. That’s the world that we live in now.”
Donald Trump had been US president again for less than 15 minutes when he made his first factually dubious claim.
“The vicious, violent and unfair weaponisation of the justice department and our government will end,” he said early in his inaugural address. There is no evidence that former president Joe Biden ordered the justice department to prosecute Trump and no violence took place.
The return of Trump to the White House for his second presidential term is also the return of what one critic called “America’s liar-in-chief”. His first week in office brought a cascade of false and misleading claims about immigration, the economy, electric vehicles, the Panama Canal, his election defeat in 2020 and the January 6 insurrection that followed.
Some see the brazen embrace of mendacity as both habitual and strategic.
“It’s a continuation of Donald Trump’s brand,” said Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill. “He knows that sunlight is the best disinfectant so he’s going to continue to lie to mask what he’s doing. If you can undermine institutions and credible sources of information, you can get away with lying and deceiving people. We’re watching that mass delusion happen right before our eyes in the Trump administration 2.0.”
During his first term as president, Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims over four years, according to a count by the Washington Post. He maintained a similar pace during last year’s presidential election campaign. On Monday, as he was sworn in for a second time at the US Capitol in Washington, he made clear it will be business as usual.
Trump said in his inaugural address the US government “fails to protect our magnificent, law-abiding American citizens but provides sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals, many from prisons and mental institutions that have illegally entered our country from all over the world”. In truth there is no evidence other countries are sending their criminals or the mentally ill across the border.
The 47th president also promised to direct his cabinet to defeat “record inflation” and rapidly bring down costs and prices. Inflation peaked at 9.1% under Biden in June 2022 but has been much higher in other historical periods, such as a more than 14% rate in 1980.
But while fact-checkers continued to hold Trump to account, Republicans seemed less willing than ever to correct the record while rightwing influencers were eager to amplify his falsehoods in what is now a fragmented media ecosystem. The leaders of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and X attended his inauguration; Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that the platform will abandon third party fact-checking.
Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist and media relations consultant, said: “If there’s any lasting impact from Donald Trump’s time on the political stage it’s that we live in a world now where you can just make up your own facts and truth is how ever you decide to to bend it.
“There are content creators and content machines that exist solely for the purpose of laundering anything that Donald Trump says and making it true to a certain degree. It’s a play off the [Richard] Nixon quote: if the president does it, it is legal; well, if the president says it, it’s true. That’s the world that we live in now.”
