February 10, 2026
Stopping exposing them allows them to metastasize.
President Donald Trump speaks with reporters aboard Air Force One on February 6, 2026. (Samuel Corum/Getty Images) By now, most Americans are accustomed to the daily blizzard of lies from Trump and his administration. These are not simply exaggerations or errors. They are part of a sustained attack on the main pillars of American democracy – the courts, the media, schools and universities, museums and cultural institutions, and even sports – to intimidate people into submission so that he can govern without guardrails, without constitutional protections, without checks and balances – or without the truth.
In 2018, Steve Bannon, a former key political adviser to Trump, said that the president’s main adversary was the press and that “the way to deal with it is to flood the zone with shit.” When reporters expose his lies or ask tough questions, Trump calls them “fake news.”
Trump came onto the public stage in 1973 when he lied about a federal government report documenting that he discriminated against black people in his buildings. It was well known among New York columnists and journalists that Trump had lied about his wealth, sexual relationships and business activities. From 2011 to 2016, Trump was a leading proponent of the discredited “Birther” conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
He began his first presidential campaign by lying that undocumented immigrants were responsible for a disproportionate share of violent crime — a claim he often repeats. “We looked at homicides, sexual assaults, violent crimes, property crimes, traffic and drug violations,” said Michael Light, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin. The United States today. “And what we see generally is that undocumented immigrants tend to have lower delinquency rates for all of these types of offenses.”
Trump lied about the size of the crowd at his 2017 inauguration, which spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway justified as “alternative facts.” (These were not facts, or even a different interpretation of the facts. They were lies.) He lied about his 2019 phone call with Volodymr Zelensky, promising military aid to Ukraine in exchange for news on Joe and Hunter Biden. He lied when he sent federal troops to Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Minneapolis claiming they were overwhelmed by rising crime and violence when in fact crime in those cities was falling. He lied that Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating pets in Ohio.
Lying has become so normal in the Trump administration that his top aides lie on his behalf, even when the lie is transparent. In his recent speech in Davos, for example, Trump confused Greenland and Iceland four times. It wasn’t a lie, just Trump’s own mental confusion. But then the president’s secretary Karoline Leavitt lied about what the whole world saw and heard. “No, he didn’t,” Leavitt wrote on X in response to a reporter who accurately described Trump’s confusion. “His written remarks referred to Greenland as a ‘piece of ice’ because that’s what it is.”
Current number
Trump’s number of lies has likely multiplied dramatically during his second term. He seems to believe he can get away with breaking the law, defying the courts and lying regularly.
Here are some examples of Trump’s (and his top aides’) lies during his second term, particularly in recent weeks.
1. He lied about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, initially claiming he barely knew him.
2. He lied about why he invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president, first claiming it was drug trafficking when it was clearly oil.
3. He lied about the end of seven or eight wars (the number varies), for which he claimed to deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.
4. He I lied when I said that Renée Good “Violently, intentionally and viciously, he knocked down the ICE officer, who appeared to have shot him in self-defense. » Vice President JD Vance doubled down on his own lie that Good “pointed his car at a law enforcement officer and stepped on the accelerator. No one doubts that.”
5. He lied about Alex Pretti, calling the 37-year-old intensive care nurse who was fatally shot by Border Patrol agents a “agitator, and perhaps, insurgent» and “out of control”. Stephen Miller lied when he described Pretti as a “potential assassin.” Miller and HHS Secretary Kristi Noem called Pretti a “domestic terrorist.” His agency lied that Pretti was obstructing an operation and “brandishing” a weapon.
6. Trump lied when he said the United States now had “the best economy ever!” ” and called the affordability crisis a “hoax” perpetrated by Democrats. He said food prices were “falling”, although they had increased. In January, Trump lied that gasoline was “$1.99 in many states” when the lowest average price in all states was $2.34 and the national average was $2.78. He has pledged to reduce the price of prescription drugs by 500 to 3,000 percent, which is mathematically impossible.
7. Trump lied that “the Canadian people love” his proposal to make Canada the 51st state, but polls reveal that 90 percent of Canadians oppose the idea.
8. Trump lied about white South Africans being targeted for genocide, his excuse for allowing 59 Afrikaners to resettle here as refugees.
9. Trump repeatedly lied about the “stolen” or “rigged” 2020 election, a lie that led to the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. On his first day back in office last year, he pardoned or commuted the prison sentences of the more than 1,500 people charged with these crimes. Trump lied that “the people who went there didn’t have guns.” In truth, many rioters were armed. He lied about his role in the January 6 mutiny and his unsuccessful efforts to overturn the election. He is trying to lay the groundwork to invoke the Insurrection Act to send federal troops to disrupt the upcoming election.
Trump’s lies come up so often every day that it’s hard to keep up with them. It is not enough for the media to publish articles that allow Trump to spew lies and then note that some of his statements are “without evidence” or to cite an expert to contradict him. These are scattered anecdotes, making it difficult to see the whole picture.
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During his first term, The Washington Post compiled a daily list of his lies throughout his first term. THE Job identified 30,573 lies during this period, an average of 21 lies per day during his tenure. THE Job no longer has the mission of holding Trump accountable.
THE Times (who kept a pointing of lies from Trump’s first term for just one year) could usefully reestablish a daily dashboard of his lies (and those of his top aides) in coordination with the Associated Press, Politiact, Reuters and ProPublica. He could count the number of lies every day, every week and cumulatively for the rest of his term, categorize them into different topics and highlight egregious examples of major lies. It could distribute the dashboard to all subscribing media and make it public on its website.
A daily scorecard would drive Trump crazy. He would certainly threaten news organizations with legal action or other forms of intimidation. But if there was ever a time when we needed the media to challenge the daily, deliberate, and escalating dishonesty of the nation’s president, it’s now, when our democracy is in danger.
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Pierre Dreier Peter Dreier teaches politics at Occidental College and is the author of several books, including Baseball Rebels: The players, people and social movements who shook up the game and changed Americapublished in April 2022.
