ABSTRACT
Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims (or lies) during his presidency. It is not just the number of lies that are childlike and pathological but also their degree of falsehood, their repetition, and their meanness. This chapter covers many of his big, and repetitive, lies, beginning when he lied in business and as a business (e.g., Trump University) to the big lie he continues to tell about winning the 2020 presidential election. In between those periods were lies about the “incredible” economy, a “big, beautiful wall” he would build and Mexico would pay for, the Mueller investigation, the “perfect phone call” regarding Ukraine, the “magical disappearance” of the coronavirus, his second impeachment, and the classified documents he took illegally with him to Mar-a-Lago. As discussed in this chapter, many of those lies, and particularly the big lie about the election, are perfect examples of a contemporary information-warfare technique used by Russian President Putin in his invasions of Ukraine called the “firehose of falsehood.”
