Pants on Fire: For Trump, It's a Lying Game

Jeff Robbins on Mar 11, 2025

Say what you will about Joseph Goebbels, the Third Reich's Minister of Propaganda: the man lied for a living, and he knew one heck of a lot about lying. Before committing suicide in Berlin in 1945, he left a formidable body of commentary about the art of lying and the psychology of it.

"This is the secret of propaganda," Goebbels observed. "Those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in the idea of the propaganda, without ever noticing that they are being immersed in it." And this: "It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition, and a psychological understanding of the people concerned, that a square is in fact a circle." And this famous one: "If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself."

Commandment No. 9 of 10 prohibits the bearing of false witness, but for a supposedly God-fearing country, America is remarkably enthusiastic about a president who lies to it repeatedly, brazenly and endlessly. On Jan. 20, 2021, Washington Post fact-checkers calculated that Donald Trump had made a total of 30,573 false or misleading claims while in office, averaging about 21 per day, Saturdays, Sundays and holidays included.

That's some clip.

In Trump's defense, many of the falsehoods were essentially duplicates: that COVID was a nothingburger that would "miraculously" disappear, that he'd won the 2020 election he lost, that he'd presided over the greatest economy in history and so forth.

Not only hasn't Trump missed a beat in the lying game since returning to office; he's picked up the pace. His speech to Congress last week was a tour de force of dissembling, a whole lot of dishonesty packed into one hour and 40 minutes.

There was "As you know, we inherited from the last administration an economic catastrophe" (complete balderdash); "I've stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America" (patently counterfactual); and the claim that 21 million undocumented immigrants entered the U.S. during Joe Biden's term (simply false). There was the assertion that the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, "found hundreds of billions of dollars" in fraud (just made up) and that our neighbors had released people from "mental institutions and insane asylums" to penetrate America (likewise made up). One notable doozy was that the government had spent $8 million "for making mice transgender."

One of Trump's go-to BS clusters is on Ukraine, and this featured prominently in the speech. Russia, run by a murderous tyrant, has Trump's support. Ukraine, invaded by Russia, is led by the democratically elected Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whom Trump calls a "dictator." But the BS doesn't stop there. "We spent perhaps $350 billion (in supporting Ukraine)," Trump proclaimed. "Like taking candy from a baby. And (Europe has) spent $100 billion. What a difference that is."

It is true that there's a big difference between $350 billion and $100 billion, but otherwise this was more hogwash. According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think tank that tracks aid to Ukraine, as of December 2024 Europe had committed $266 billion to Ukraine, while the U.S. had committed $128 billion. So, instead of the U.S. providing three and a half times what Europe has, Europe has committed more than twice what the U.S. has.

But who's counting?

And as far as the clever "Like taking candy from a baby" line goes, American workers receive most of what we spend defending the embattled country against Russian aggression. "A large share of the money in the (Ukraine) aid bills has been spent in the United States paying for American factories and workers to produce the various weapons that are either shipped to Ukraine or that replenish the U.S. weapons stocks the Pentagon has drawn on during the war," reported the Council on Foreign Relations last week. The conservative American Enterprise Institute estimates that 70% of American aid for Ukraine is spent here at home.

Donald Trump long ago concluded that whatever they may think they believe, Americans are perfectly fine with having a serial liar in the White House. Truth is, by all appearances, he's right.

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Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.