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President Donald Trump moved at a blistering pace in his first month back in the White House. He lied fast and furious, too.<\/p>\n
In speeches, interviews, exchanges with reporters and posts on social media, the president filled his public statements not only with exaggerations but outright fabrications. As he did during his first presidency, Trump made false claims with a frequency and variety unmatched by any other elected official in Washington.<\/p>\n
Here is our list of Trump\u2019s 13 biggest lies since he was inaugurated on January 20. It was hard to choose.<\/p>\n
The tale of the $50 million \u2013 no, make it $100 million \u2013 in condoms for Hamas:<\/strong> When press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced at her first official White House briefing that Trump had thwarted a plan to spend $50 million \u201cto fund condoms in Gaza,\u201d it was immediately clear the claim was highly dubious; the Trump administration had no evidence to substantiate it. But Trump not only repeated the $50 million figure the next day, he added an incendiary claim that the condoms were \u201cfor Hamas.\u201d Then, days after it had become obvious the $50 million figure was pure fiction, he inflated it to \u201c$100 million.\u201d<\/p>\n This was another example of Trumpflation \u2013 the president\u2019s years-old habit of making his inaccurate stories more and more inaccurate over time.<\/p>\n Blaming Ukraine for starting the war on Ukraine:<\/strong> Russia started the war in Ukraine when it invaded Ukraine in 2022. That is an obvious fact. But on Tuesday, when Trump dismissed Ukrainians\u2019 complaints about their exclusion from US-Russia negotiations about ending the war, he falsely accused Ukraine of starting the war \u2013 saying, \u201cYou should\u2019ve never started it. You could\u2019ve made a deal.\u201d Laughable Kremlin-style propaganda, this time from the president of the United States.<\/p>\n The (non-)uniqueness of birthright citizenship:<\/strong> Trump offered what might have sounded like a reasonable rationale for his attempt to get rid of birthright citizenship. The United States, he said, is the only country that has birthright citizenship.<\/p>\n Except that is not true, as CNN and other outlets pointed out when Trump made the same claim as president in 2018 and on various other occasions. Dozens of countries, including Canada and Mexico, also grant automatic citizenship to people born on their soil.<\/p>\n More up-is-down reversing of the reality of January 6: <\/strong>For years now, Trump has presented a version of the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021, that bears little resemblance to what actually happened. When he was asked in early February why he granted pardons to people who assaulted first responders, he said the people he pardoned were actually \u201cassaulted by our government\u201d and that \u201cthey didn\u2019t assault.\u201d This \u201cthey didn\u2019t assault\u201d claim was a brazen denial of the obvious truth, clear in video after video and trial after trial. The Justice Department has said more than 140 officers were assaulted on January 6, and that more than 170 people pleaded guilty to such assaults.<\/p>\n A gusher of deceit about California water policy: <\/strong>Amid disaster, more dishonesty. First, Trump linked the Los Angeles wildfires to California\u2019s decision to use some of its water to protect a fish species in the northern part of the state \u2013 even though the two things have nothing to do with each other, as befuddled experts explained to anyone who would listen. Then, after ordering the sudden release of billions of gallons of water from Central Valley reservoirs for no apparent good reason, Trump declared that some of this water was heading to Los Angeles \u2013 even though it wasn\u2019t heading to Los Angeles and couldn\u2019t go to Los Angeles.<\/p>\n The election lie he refused to let die: <\/strong>What can you even say about this one at this point? Trump\u2019s win in the free and fair 2024 election did not convince him to abandon his endless lying about his defeat in the free and fair 2020 election. More than four years after his loss to Joe Biden, he repeated his \u201crigged\u201d nonsense during at least three events on his 2025 inauguration day alone, then a bunch of times after that.<\/p>\n That fable about Olympic boxers, again:<\/strong> Trump, once a prominent promoter of lies about President Barack Obama\u2019s birthplace, continued to demonstrate no hesitation lying about not only policy issues but also individual people. This time, to promote his push to try to get transgender athletes banned from the Olympics, he told his familiar story about how two gold medalists in women\u2019s boxing at the Games in Paris last year were men who \u201ctransitioned.\u201d<\/p>\n Wrong. As the International Olympic Committee repeatedly noted during the Olympics, when Trump and others made such claims, neither champion had transitioned; both were born as female and have always competed in women\u2019s events. Even the discredited boxing authority that controversially disqualified the women from a 2023 competition, vaguely claiming a test had found they had unfair competitive advantages, did not allege they had transitioned.<\/p>\n The president\u2019s fictionalized northern neighbor:<\/strong> Before taking office, Trump casually asserted that the Canadian people \u201clike\u201d his idea of Canada becoming the 51st US state. That was the opposite of the truth; the idea is hugely unpopular with the Canadian public. Then, after his inauguration, Trump continued to make stuff up about Canada \u2013 at one point posting on social media and then saying out loud that Canada prohibits US banks from doing business there. He added, \u201cCan you believe that?\u201d No doubt some Americans believe it, but it\u2019s false.<\/p>\n Blasting Biden for a program launched under Trump: <\/strong>After the deadly January collision between a military helicopter and a passenger jet, Trump blamed Biden administration diversity initiatives at the Federal Aviation Administration without providing any evidence any FAA diversity policy had anything to do with the crash. He added in a fictional story about a frantic last-minute Biden push to hire people with significant disabilities as air traffic controllers, failing to explain that this FAA pilot program was actually a years-old initiative launched during his own administration in 2019.<\/p>\n Relentless deception about who pays tariffs:<\/strong> When Trump talked about the tariffs he imposed on Chinese imports in his first presidency, he spoke of how much money \u201cfrom China\u201d these tariffs generated for the US Treasury. When he talked about the additional tariffs he plans to impose on various other countries during his current presidency, he spoke of a need to \u201ccharge them.\u201d At no point did he acknowledge that US importers, not foreign countries, are the ones who pay the actual tariff charges \u2013 or that study after study, including one from the federal government\u2019s bipartisan trade commission, found that Americans ended up bearing almost the entire cost of his first-term tariffs on Chinese products.<\/p>\n A wild exaggeration of the increase in autism rates: <\/strong>Trump keeps flirting with, though not explicitly endorsing, the thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory that childhood vaccines cause autism \u2013 and in a social media post in early February, he inflated the extent of the increase in the known prevalence of autism over the last two decades. \u201c20 years ago, Autism in children was 1 in 10,000. NOW IT\u2019S 1 in 34,\u201d Trump wrote. \u201cWOW! Something\u2019s really wrong.\u201d Aside from the fact that experts say the increase in autism diagnoses (to 1 in 36 children by age 8 in 2020) likely has to do with greater awareness of the symptoms and improved screening practices, public statistics from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the known prevalence in 2004 was 1 in 125 children, not \u201c1 in 10,000.\u201d That\u2019s a pretty big difference.<\/p>\n China\u2019s (non-)operation of the Panama Canal:<\/strong> Much of Trump\u2019s lying is ad-libbed. Some of it, however, is planned in advance. Some of it, however, is written into his prepared speeches. He said in his inaugural address in January: \u201cAbove all, China is operating the Panama Canal. And we didn\u2019t give it to China, we gave it to Panama, and we\u2019re taking it back.\u201d<\/p>\n This would have been a good line if China was actually operating the Panama Canal. It isn\u2019t; Panama is, though Trump could have raised legitimate questions about China\u2019s influence in the area.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s invented dominance with \u201cthe youth vote\u201d: <\/strong>Trump said some accurate things while touting his victory in the 2024 election, such as the fact that he swept all seven swing states. But in keeping with his longstanding practice of exaggerating even legitimate accomplishments, he also kept sprinkling in a claim that wasn\u2019t even close to correct \u2013 an assertion that he won the youth vote \u201cby 36 points.\u201d In fact, exit polls show he lost the youth vote to then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Even if these polls were off, there\u2019s no basis for the claim that he won the youth vote by 36.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n