Inside the trillion-dollar cost of Trump's lies

It may be that society is often described as being built on “lies,” which can refer to the collective myths, social constructs, and commercial narratives that keep civilization functioning rather than literal malicious deceptions, as a Quora.com online discussion has batted around.

But that is about cultural lies we tell ourselves about the shared American Dream, for example, not about intentional lying of the sort we see daily from the Trump administration. We even expect self-promoting “spin” from our politicians, whether we accept it or not.

For the Justice Department to have dropped its inane criminal charges of vandalism against Olympian David Hearn for noticing the big paint chips floating in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pools is not just admission that the “damage” was from a botched painting job rather than criminal act. It was another in the long series of public policy lies that we endure from Donald Trump, who had insisted without evidence on his version of Truth. (Trump later criticized U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, his appointee, and insisted anew that there had been extensive vandalism at the pool.)

So too announcing a roadmap to peace in Gaza without the sign-on of the warring parties, or the ever-repeated election rigging schemes never proved or posts about prices going down when they are going up.

Truth – or denial of verifiable fact — is the ultimate prime product of the Trump Era.

While lying and moral outrage against lying are human universals, a society built on public policy lies pays an ever-expanding price across economic, social, and political dimensions. When foundational data, risk assessments and policy promises are falsified, and the eventual consequences can manifest as severe systemic failures. Policy based on lies can lead to trillions of dollars in misspending or cuts to basic services, to unconstitutional abridgment of rights and invented new powers for a president whom his party majority in Congress refuses to check.

Trump wants us to believe only what he says – before he changes it to a new theme for an attention-depressed voter population. The Washington Post and other news organizations have tracked tens of thousands of Trump’s public lies.

We’re seeing wars started and widened over purposeful misstatement of fact or considered omission of whatever has passed as rigorous intelligence. We see ruination of Head Start over propaganda over diversity and equity concerns among three-year-olds. We see lies about criminal records of undocumented immigrants, a conspiracy to ruin women’s sports with trans athletes, the unpatriotic criticism of late-night comedians amplified to tidal-wave proportions to justify the building of an authoritarian state.

That Donald Trump lies is not a question. News outlets, lawsuits and court orders, research and the result of everyday reality show oodles of his policy statements – never mind his more personal opinions – to be based on nothing but gut and venomous targets of revenge. Call it misstatements or propaganda or political spin, it’s based on acceptance of public lies.

We should call them that – lies, intentional misstatement of facts for some gain.

All Lies Are Not Equal

Naturally, some lies are plain silly, including crowd sizes when we can see video of the event. Some lies are just about braggadocio and self-promotion, as with declaring polls of adoration rather than rejection. Some lies are whoppers, including statements about supposed fraud or hoped-for criminality in finding seashells captured by an opponent’s phone camera.

Here’s my guide to sorting out the misstatement from the mis-fact .

–Lies that substitute meaning for fact. Whether the 2020 election results, the Capitol riot/attempted insurrection, the cause of reflecting pool woes or whether polls are consistently showing American rejection of the war of choice in Iran, for years, Donald Trump has insisted on reflecting only his own “alternative” facts. As a nation, we have always agreed to disagree, though the usual place to begin is with whatever just happened. Over a decade of Trump in our public life, we have managed to shuck any need for facts.

–Lies that omit the context, background. The basic statement may reflect a specific truth but may miss the point. War/Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is not lying or even incorrect when he says that U.S. military strikes (mostly) struck intended targets in Iran, but he offers that as if it is a proper assessment of where we stand strategically. Obviously, doing so is a “lie,” or we would not still have conflict. Similarly, the entire Epstein Files discussion is more than whether Trump himself spent partying time with Jeffrey Epstein. So too is committing random spending cuts for foreign aid certainly have resulted in deaths linked to disease and hunger, Elon Musk’s dismissals notwithstanding.

–Lies that misstate the significance or create unbalanced comparisons. In the entire country, there likely are under 100 high school or college trans athletes who want to compete in gender-separated sports. Yet to listen to Trump, we are expected to believe that Democrats – or “Communists” – want “trans for all,” and that we have an epidemic of gender fluidity among teens that somehow is a problem only if it there is use of a school bathroom or locker room that likely should be supervised in any case. Similarly, the number of undocumented migrants who have been convicted or even charged with violent crime, the number of election fraud cases altogether, never mind those that might affect a vote total, the number of countries “ripping off” the U.S. by selling us goods that we choose to buy all are examples.

–Lies that twist language – whether legal, diplomatic or political. Trump’s cutesy, ridiculing names for his opponents are hidden tells about his fears of criticism. The gap between what he tells the American public about immigration, education or tariffs vary regularly and mightily from what his lawyers tell federal courts after someone challenges the truth of affected outcomes. What would you call telling a judge that the deportees’ plane did not leave the country when it had if not a lie? How can Trump ballyhoo a directed Justice Department indictment when it cannot even persuade a grand jury that hears only the government side of a case because the presentation only persuaded jurors the allegations were lies?

Add to this the constancy of Trump changing his mind about things small and large, including apparently calling off renewed strikes against Iran this weekend to cite “progress” in negotiations that no one else can confirm.

Most pundits, critics, and news reporters, behind recent books about Trump, those who follow the Pentagon’s doings, and those who follow the ups and downs of Business say the going-in assumption has shifted to believe first that what Trump says about the country is wrong, uninformed, propaganda – a lie. Even those television voices that support Trump unquestionably simply omit mention of where he steps over the Truth line.

We have been warned by plenty of Big Brother critiques and experiences of real people hurt by Trump lies. The question is why Congress, courts and the public put up with it.

Terry H. Schwadron retired as a senior editor at The New York Times, Deputy Managing Editor at The Los Angeles Times and leadership jobs at The Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin. He was part of a Pulitzer Gold Medal team in Los Angeles, and his team part of several Pulitzers in New York.