Donald Trump toned down the yelling and spit-spraying and interrupting at Thursday night’s debate, but he in no way toned down the lies. In fact, the best Trump fact-checker out there had this to say:
That’s still true if you exclude outrageous statements like “I’m the least racist person in this room” as not being fact-checkable. By contrast, while Joe Biden “made some missteps and stretched the truth at times, his comments essentially hewed to the truth,” CNN concluded.
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Trump lied so damn many times it’s difficult to summarize. He offered up a constant stream of lies, in some cases overstepping the lie he was trying to tell and coming up with a whole new one, as with his accusation that Biden received $3.5 million from the former mayor of Moscow’s wife. The official Trump campaign talking point is that Hunter Biden got that money, and that claim isn’t true, either.
But Trump didn’t just lie in making personal attacks on Biden and his family. Many of Trump’s lies are far more consequential, like his truly astonishing number of lies about the coronavirus pandemic. Trump claimed, again, “We're rounding the corner. It's going away.” NOPE. He claimed a vaccine was “ready.” That he was “kidding” when he suggested people inject bleach to treat coronavirus. NOPE and NOPE. He claimed that 99.9% of young people and 99% of all people recover from COVID-19. In reality, 2.6% of people in the U.S. who’ve tested positive for the virus have died. He attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci for saying what was, at the time, understood to be the best practice—that people shouldn’t wear masks to help avert shortages for healthcare workers. He claimed 2.2 million were “expected to die” from coronavirus and he averted two million of those deaths, pulling from a projection of what could happen if no one—not the federal government, not the state governments, not individuals—did anything to prevent the spread of the virus. He exaggerated his ban on travel from China, accused Biden of having opposed that ban, which he did not, and claimed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been “dancing on the streets in Chinatown in San Francisco.” Pelosi visited Chinatown but … no, Pelosi did not dance on the streets.
That’s just Trump’s coronavirus lies. One single subject area.
Other big lies for this debate include Trump’s ongoing claim that China is paying tariffs that are actually being paid by U.S. consumers. Trump’s insistence that immigrants “never come back” for court hearings—in fact, 75% do. Trump’s claim that the U.S. has the cleanest air and water in the world—both false and a dodge on the issue of climate change.
Outrageously, the man elected in 2016 in part with the help of Russian interference claimed that Russia is trying to interfere in the 2020 elections to hurt him. Extremely false. He claimed that the Mueller investigation “went through everything I had, including my tax returns, and they found absolutely no collusion and nothing wrong.” Investigators did not get Trump’s tax returns, they did not absolve him of collusion, and they made a detailed case that he had obstructed justice. To say nothing of his various campaign staffers and advisers who were convicted of crimes.
Trump lies on the biggest things and the smallest things. (Like claiming that Biden has “houses all over the place” when Biden has two houses and they’re both in Delaware.) He lies to make himself better and to make everyone else look worse. He says outrageously false things he’s probably convinced himself are true and also repeats, again and again, things he definitely knows are lies. This debate was no different, even if he wasn’t mostly screaming the lies.