The 15 most notable lies of Donald Trump's presidency

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Trying to pick the most notable lies from Donald Trump's presidency is like trying to pick the most notable pieces of junk from the town dump.

There's just so much ugly garbage to sift through before you can make a decision.
But I'm qualified for the dirty job. I fact checked every word uttered by this President from his inauguration day in January 2017 until September 2020 -- when the daily number of lies got so unmanageably high that I had to start taking a pass on some of his remarks to preserve my health.
Trump got even worse after November 3. Since then, he has spent the final months of what has been a wildly dishonest presidency on a relentless and dangerous lying spree about the election he lost.
As the country grapples with the deadly consequences of this deception, I've selected the 15 Trump lies that stand out to me from his four years in power -- for their importance, for their egregiousness, for their absurdity, or for what they say about the man.

Trump began his presidency by lying about the weather.
It rained during Trump's inaugural address. Then, at a celebratory ball later that day, Trump told the crowd that the rain "just never came" until he finished talking and went inside, at which point "it poured."
This was the first lie of Trump's presidency. Like his lies that same week about his inauguration crowd, it hinted at what would come next.
The President would say things that we could see with our own eyes were not true. And he would often do this brazen lying for no apparent strategic reason.

This was more like a family of lies than a single lie. But each one -- the lie that the virus was equivalent to the flu; the lie that the situation was "totally under control"; the lie that the virus was "disappearing" -- suggested to Americans that they didn't have find to change much about their usual behavior.
A year into the crisis, more than 386,000 Americans have died from the virus.
We can't say with precision how the crisis would have unfolded differently if Trump had been more truthful. But it's reasonable to venture that his dishonesty led to a significant number of deaths.

Trump tweeted in 2019 that Alabama was one of the states at greater risk from Hurricane Dorian than had been initially forecast. The federal weather office in Birmingham then tweeted that, actually, Alabama would be unaffected by the storm.

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Not great, but fixable fast with a simple White House correction. Trump, however, is so congenitally unwilling to admit error that he embarked on an increasingly farcical campaign to prove that his incorrect Alabama tweet was actually correct, eventually showcasing a hurricane map that Website was crudely altered with a Sharpie.

The slapstick might have been funny had White House officials not leaped into action behind the scenes to try to pressure federal weather experts into saying he was right and they were wrong. The saga proved that Trump was not some lone liar: he was backed by an entire powerful apparatus willing to fight for his fabrications.

When I emailed the Boy Scouts of America in 2017 about Trump's claim that "the head of the Boy Scouts" had called look these up him to say that his bizarrely political address to the Scouts' National Jamboree was "the greatest speech that was ever made to them," I didn't expect a reply. One of the hardest things about fact checking Trump was that a lot of people he lied about did not think it was in their interest to be quoted publicly contradicting a vengeful president.

The Boy Scouts did. A senior Scouts source -- a phrase I never expected to have to type as a political reporter in Washington, DC -- confirmed to me that no call ever happened.

Yep, the President of the United States was lying about the Boy Scouts.

At a White House event in 2019, Trump grossly distorted a 2013 quote from Rep. Ilhan Omar to try to get his supporters to believe that the Minnesota Democrat had expressed support for the terrorist group al Qaeda.

Trump went on to deliver additional bigoted attacks against Omar in the following months. But it's hard to imagine a more vile lie for the President to tell about a Muslim official -- who had already been getting death threats -- than a smear that makes her sound pro-terrorist.

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