That’s an absolute lie.

A Test for Trump’s Disinformation Operation

Can our political system beat back a movement predicated on lying?

David Corn

During one of the recent frantic, manic, and racist rants Donald Trump has delivered at red-state campaign rallies to boost imperiled Republican candidates, the bloviator-in-chief—in between comments about people’s asses and boasts of his own purported greatness—claimed credit for turning Washington, DC, from a hellscape of crime to a citadel of safety. He brayed:

Nobody wanted to eat out. They were afraid. Even if you were in the restaurant, people would walk in and, like the Wild West, hold it up! Everybody is standing there. Can you imagine? A fancy restaurant. They were robbing the whole restaurant. It’s crazy.

That’s an absolute lie.

For Trump, lying is like breathing. It never stops.

Trump is a serial prevaricator who cannot stop spouting falsehoods. During his first run in the White House, The Washington Post cataloged 30,573 false statements that he emitted. (Nowadays, the Post, following billionaire owner Jeff Bezos’ loving embrace of Trump, doesn’t bother to systematically track his deceptions.) But I am highlighting this particular fib because it is so idiotic and so transparently untrue. As a resident of the metropolitan DC area, I can say that folks here were not afraid to go out to dinner prior to Trump’s pointless dispatch of National Guard troops and that “whole” restaurants were not being pillaged by malfeasant marauders.

For Trump, lying is like breathing. It never stops. It occurs automatically, without thinking. Once upon a time, we rebuked politicians if their spin deviated too far from reality. They were afforded much license to hail their supposed accomplishments and policy proposals and assault their rivals’ liabilities and intentions. There was tremendous leeway for stretching the truth. But outright lying was considered a step too far.

During the 1988 GOP presidential primary contest, the campaign of Vice President George H.W. Bush aired ads accusing his main rival, Sen. Bob Dole, of being wishy-washy on tax policy. In an interview, when Dole was asked if he had a message for Bush, he growled, “Yeah, stop lying about my record.” That was considered a big deal.

These days, the lies are far more brazen and blatant, and an accusation of lying barely rates a mention in any news story.

The GOP’s midterm effort that he’s leading—like his past presidential campaigns—is foremost a disinformation operation. Trump never stops pumping out extreme falsehoods.

That’s partly—or largely—because Trump has turned the Republican Party and the MAGA movement into one big disinformation outfit. He doesn’t spin. He lies over and over, and his party and cult happily go along with and cheer on his deceit. The GOP’s midterm effort that he’s leading—like his past presidential campaigns—is foremost a disinformation operation. Trump never stops pumping out extreme falsehoods.

He tells the crowd at one rally that “98 percent” of Somali immigrants in the United States “don’t work…because they steal so much. They all have a Mercedes-Benz…low IQ. And they live better than you.” He repeatedly proclaims that the United States is experiencing an economic Golden Age after he “inherited the worst inflation in American history” and that inflation is down to 1.8 percent. The worst inflation in US history was 23.7 percent in 1920, and it was 3.0 percent when Trump returned to the White House last year. Currently, it’s 3.7 percent.

He calls his Democratic foes and critics “communists.” They are not. Even members of the Democratic Socialists of America are not communists. He continues to spread the debunked MAGA conspiracy theory that James Talarico, the Democratic senatorial candidate in Texas, left the campaign trail to be treated for mental illness. He asserts that Democrats are for “open borders” (they are not) and that President Joe Biden allowed 25 million people to “pour across the borders,” including drug dealers, rapists, and 11,888 murderers. These numbers are exceedingly wrong.

Does Trump—and the MAGA devotees he’s trying to stir up—believe there are operating rooms in schools where these procedures are happening in secrecy?

Perhaps the most disturbing lie Trump has been hawking is that schools are performing gender transition operations on children without the knowledge of their parents. This is batcrap crazy—but it fuels anti-trans paranoia. Schools these days cannot even dispense an aspirin without the consent of a parent. And there is no evidence to support this claim. Does Trump—and the MAGA devotees he’s trying to stir up—believe there are operating rooms in schools where these procedures are happening in secrecy?

At a rally in Georgia, Trump went deep on this lie:

We got critical race theory and transgender mutilization insanity out of our schools. I mean, we have five states where your child goes off to school as Tim and comes back as Tammy, three or four days later. It’s true. And teachers make—somebody makes a decision. Can you imagine? “Goodbye, Timmy. I love you so much. I’ll see you later.” And you say, “Where’s my son? My son is in the hospital.” Can you imagine? Can you imagine? They don’t even need approval. It’s sick. You’ll have five—I think Minnesota and some others—I think it’s five or six states. You know that, right? 

That’s a bit he regularly injects into his meandering stump speech (which increasingly includes strange sounds that are not words).

I know. Complaining about Trump’s lying is like complaining about the weather. Two years ago, as the 2024 campaign was hurtling to its finish, I wrote an article headlined, “Trump Is Running a Disinformation Campaign, Not a Political Campaign.” (“They’re eating the dogs…They’re eating the cats.”) Nothing has changed. Except, it seems, the purveyors of fake facts have expanded in number. Now GOP disinformation is flying in scores of House, Senate, and gubernatorial campaigns.

Musk is echoing Trump’s false assertions. “Talarico will vote to take away your children and transition them,” he wrote on X this week.

In Texas, Elon Musk has spent close to $200 million so far to defeat Talarico and elect Ken Paxton, the corrupt GOP attorney general, with much of that money underwriting transgender-related attack ads. And Musk is echoing Trump’s false assertions. “Talarico will vote to take away your children and transition them,” he wrote on X this week. Again, an utterly false statement. Like Trump, Musk catches no flak for lying and amplifying false conspiracy theories. (As of October 25, Republican groups had aired about 217,000 ads nationwide exploiting the trans issue—about one-quarter of those were in Texas.)

I could go on and on about the lies coming from Vice President JD Vance, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, and other Trump wingmen (are there any wingwomen?) who have hit the campaign trail. (You can find some below in Dumbass Comment of the Week.) Cruz claims Michigan Democratic Senate contender Abdul El-Sayed “is Muslim Brotherhood.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott insists his Democratic opponent, Texas state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, supports Shariah law. This is all bunk—the sort of stuff that in years past would have derailed the campaign of the candidate spewing it.

Now, it’s GOP SOP. With his victory two years ago, Trump demonstrated that a con-man demagogue—who profoundly mismanaged a pandemic—could win back the highest office in the land by running a nonstop and extensive disinformation operation. This year, he’s relying on the same tactic to preserve Republican power on the Hill.

With Trump’s approval rating at a historic low and gas prices remaining high because of the stupid Iran war (which Trump barely talks about when he’s stumping for GOP candidates), selling all this bullshit is a harder task. Yet this election, like the last one, remains a test for the American political system. Can it beat back a political movement predicated on prevarication?

This election will tell us whether democratic backsliding will be reversed, whether voters will punish corrupt grifters, practitioners of plutocratic policies, and proponents of brutality, and whether such political chicanery as racist gerrymandering and big-money politics (see Musk and his hundreds of millions of dollars) can triumph. It will also show whether Trump’s disinformation crusade has stalled and his art of the lie has lost its shine.