The Horrifying Endgame of Donald Trump's Lies

March 3rd, 2016. Then-newly-elected president, Donald Trump, releases a statement laying out his position on H1B visas:

The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay […] I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labour program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions.

December 28th, 2024. Newly re-elected president, Donald Trump, releases a statement laying out his position on H1B visas:

I’ve always liked the visas. I have always been in favour of the visas. That’s why we have them. I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.

November 30th, 2018. Donald Trump signs a new trade deal with the leaders of Mexico and Canada to replace NAFTA, a deal Trump regularly described as “perhaps the worst trade deal ever made”:

It is my great honour to announce that we have successfully completed negotiations on a brand new deal to terminate and replace NAFTA […] This is a truly extraordinary agreement for the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

February 4th, 2025. Donald Trump announces his plans to impose tariffs on Mexico and Canada because of the terrible trade deal between their countries:

I mean, I look at some of the deals made, I say, ‘who the hell made these deals, they’re so bad.’

July 12th, 2022. Donald Trump ruthlessly mocks Elon Musk after a meeting about subsidising the electric cars he decried as part of a “ridiculous hoax”:

When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it’s electric cars that don’t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he’d be worthless, and telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, ‘drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it.

March 11th, 2025. Donald Trump invites Elon Musk and his electric cars to the White House, where he tries to convince the American public to buy the cars he decried as part of a ridiculous hoax:

Everything’s computer! That’s beautiful. Wow […] I’m gonna buy because, number one, it’s a great product, as good as it gets. And number two, because this man has devoted his energy and his life to doing this and I think he’s been treated very unfairly.

On September 27th, 2025, Donald Trump posted (and then deleted) a video in which an AI-generated version of his daughter-in-law presented a fake Fox News report announcing the launch of “America’s first medbed hospitals.”

“Medbeds,” for everyone who is too sane and/or intelligent to have heard of them, are a QAnon conspiracy theory based on secret alien technology that can cure any illness, heal any wound, regenerate lost limbs and even reverse ageing.

They are, of course, not real. And we know this because if they were, Trump would surely use them to make the lie that he’s 6’ 3” and 224 pounds at least somewhat believable.

But this got me thinking, what’s the point of lying about something so stupid? Why does Trump fill the air with such transparent, easily debunked lies? Especially when he knows the media will immediately point out that he’s lying?

Well, first of all, he does it because he knows the media will point it out.

Trump’s constant lies — and the constant criticism those lies inevitably generate — allow him to push a narrative that the media treats him unfairly(a narrative made easier by the fact that, infuriatingly enough, the media does occasionally treat him unfairly).

His increasingly authoritarian attacks on television networks, and on free speech more broadly, depend on this cycle.

Then there’s the fact that his lies create a sunk-cost dilemma for his supporters.

It’s one thing if you believed, back in 2016, that he was going to “drain the swamp,” and “build the wall,” and make Mexico pay for it. You might not even feel too gullible for thinking he’d end the war in Ukraine “on day one” and “cut your energy prices in half.”

But if you’re still betting on orange in 2025, if you’re still buying the red hats and the gold bars and the memecoins, if you still believe that China pays the tariffs and Trump is going to release the Epstein files, it’s much less embarrassing to keep fooling yourself than to admit you’ve been fooled.

But the most important function of Trump’s lies is that they create a liminal space where you’re never sure if a claim is fact and fiction, where it’s too exhausting to fact-check a man who can crank out twenty falsehoods per speech, where apathy feels like the only sanity-preserving reaction to the 30,573rd lie.

After all, does it really matter if he lies about his uncle knowing the Unabomber or the unemployment rate under Obama being 42% or ending wars in countries whose names he can’t pronounce and which, crucially, weren’t at war with each other?

Yes, it does matter. Because lying about “medbeds” and where his father was born and the size of his inauguration crowds is part of the same strategy he uses to get away with lying about immigrants eating pets and COVID being a “Democrat hoax” and Zelensky starting the war in Ukraine.

It matters when the president of the United States tells millions of expectant mothers, without any evidence, that Tylenol causes autism. Especially while joking about how he’s “not so careful” about what he says.

It matters when the president of the United States justifies sending the National Guard into an American city by claiming that it’s “war-ravaged” and “under siege.” And when the governor informs him that this isn’t true, he responds with the oh-so-nearly self-aware, “Well, wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening?”

It matters, and I’m sorry to harp on about this, when the president of the United States starts lying about a stolen election before the election even takes place, steadily whipping his endlessly credulous supporters into a frenzy, until they march on the Capitol building, call for the assassination of the vice-president, and launch an attack that leaves several Americans dead.

These lies aren’t designed to convince you, they’re designed to exhaust you. They’re designed to pummel your mind into submission. They’re designed to numb you to the dangerous extremes of his rhetoric.

So by the time he starts lying to US generals about an “invasion from within,” by the time he starts lamenting the fact that these enemies “don’t wear uniforms,” so it’s harder to “take them out,” his supporters are already primed to “fight like hell.”

The greatest trick Donald Trump ever pulled is convincing his cult that the truth is partisan.

That any news that doesn’t flatter him is “fake,” that any facts that expose his lies require “alternatives,” that anyone who objects to his incessant stream of bullsh*t only does so because they hate him and, by extension, his supporters.