He told too many lies for us to confidently pick a single most notable lie of the year. So we’ve picked our 12 most notable, one for every month. (We’re defining notable as some combination of egregious, important and bizarre.)
lurid stories about the horrors of illegal immigration. During a barrage of immigration-related false claims in January, as he sought public support for the government shutdown over funding for his border wall, he came up with a vivid new tale about the logistics of human trafficking.
said during a January 14 speech to the American Farm Bureau Federation. “They come in through our border, where we don’t have any barriers or walls.”
not at all true.
February: Imaginary voter fraud
Trump has depicted himself as a crusader against election fraud. What happened in February was telling.
ordered a new congressional election in the state’s ninth district because of an actual case of apparent election fraud — allegedly
perpetrated by a Republican operative who was
indicted the following week. On February 22, Trump was asked for his thoughts and he quickly pivoted to
imaginary election fraud in another state.
said. “And when I look at what’s happened in California with the votes, when I look at what happened — as you know, there was just a case where they found a million fraudulent votes…”
Trump’s lying is rarely challenged in real time. This time, a reporter did try to object to the fiction about California. Trump responded with a favorite tactic: an aggressive “Excuse me, excuse me” interjection, then more dishonesty.
March: Revisionist history on “Russia, if you’re listening”
Nearly three years after Trump made his infamous “Russia, if you’re listening” campaign request for help obtaining deleted Hillary Clinton emails, he announced a new explanation.
He had been just kidding. The media had failed to report that he had been just kidding.
told the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 2.
No, Trump didn’t make the request before 25,000 people at a rollicking arena event. No, he wasn’t laughing at the time.
2016 press conference, with a
straight face. He offered no indication that he was anything less than serious.
This was up-is-down fake history, one of Trump’s periodic efforts to rewrite a reality we were all able to witness.
April: “Windmills” and cancer
more than a decade, made perhaps his strangest claim on the subject at a National Republican Congressional Committee fundraiser on April 2.
said.
There might indeed be a “they” Trump has heard saying that wind turbines — which he habitually calls “windmills” — cause cancer. That should not mean the President should pass on their false claim to the country. But Trump is not only a serial liar but a serial sharer of inaccurate information he has heard from a motley collection of dubious sources — “many people,” “some people,” “they” — and not bothered to verify.
May: Two lies in one
Trump has been lying about Veterans Choice since 2018, falsely claiming he was the one who got it passed. His rendition on May 30, along with a similar claim in March, might have been the most egregious.
told reporters.
key author of the Choice bill.
VA MISSION Act, a law that expanded and modified the Choice program. The full name of the VA MISSION Act honors McCain: it is the John S. McCain III, Daniel K. Akaka, and Samuel R. Johnson VA Maintaining Internal Systems and Strengthening Integrated Outside Networks Act of 2018.
June: Remains, no longer returning
Trump had a real diplomatic success to boast about in 2018. North Korea had returned the remains of some of the American soldiers who were killed in the Korean War.
In 2019, as the diplomacy soured, North Korea ceased cooperating. Trump’s solution: lie that North Korea was still cooperating, thus giving false hope to hundreds of American families.
told reporters on June 25, just five days before he met with dictator Kim Jong Un at the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).
told by an interviewer that “the remains have stopped coming back.”
He responded, “But they will be. Look, we’ve gotten remains back. That will start up again.” He then continued speaking as if it had not stopped at all.
July: Smearing Rep. Ilhan Omar
said about Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar at a North Carolina campaign rally on July 17,
wrongly describing remarks she had made in a 2013 interview: “Omar laughed that Americans speak of al Qaeda in a menacing tone and remarked that, ‘You don’t say America with this intensity. You say al Qaeda — makes you proud. Al Qaeda makes you proud. You don’t speak that way about America.'”
claiming that Omar had used the phrase “evil Jews.” In September, he
shared a Twitter video that falsely claimed Omar had been dancing in celebration on the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
August: A tariff mantra
Between July 8, when we started counting Trump’s false claims at CNN, and December 15, the day until which we currently have comprehensive data, Trump’s most frequent false claim of any kind was that China is paying the entirety of the cost of his tariffs on imported Chinese products.
told reporters in one typical remark on August 18. “And I understand tariffs very well. Other countries, it may be that if I do things with other countries — but in the case of China, China is eating the tariffs, at least so far.”
numerous tariff-paying American companies and by
multiple economic
studies. But Trump said it on 49 separate occasions over those five months. And he said it 20 times in August alone, more than he did in any other month, as he faced scrutiny over his
intensifying trade war.
September: The Sharpie fiasco
initial tweet was a mistake — that, as the National Weather Service office in Birmingham, Alabama
tweeted soon afterward, Alabama was not thought to be at greater risk from Hurricane Dorian than initially thought.
displaying a Sharpie-altered map, which we could all see had been Sharpie-altered, as supposed evidence in his favor.
We counted 12 false claims from Trump on Dorian and Alabama over 11 days. Not including the Sharpie map.
October: Inverting reality on the whistleblower
The Sharpie madness was old news by the end of September. Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, and Democrats’ related impeachment push, were his most frequent subject of dishonesty in all four weeks of October.
His most frequent individual false claim on Ukraine or impeachment was that the whistleblower who complained about his dealings with Ukraine was highly inaccurate. He said this on 46 separate occasions through December 15.
said in one representative comment on October 9.
proven correct, several of them by the rough transcript Trump himself released. But Trump just kept repeating his “false story” mantra over and over — banking, as usual, on his ability to turn a lie into gospel among his supporters no matter how many times fact-checkers debunked it.
Trump first made a version of this claim at the end of September, but he repeated it on 30 separate occasions in October alone as Democrats moved toward impeachment. That was 17 more times than he uttered any other individual false claim that month.
November: Pulling “out” of Syria
claimed he had “just pulled out of Syria,” co-host Brian Kilmeade
responded, “You have 600 guys there, right?” (The military had said at the time that perhaps 600 troops would remain in northeast Syria, plus another 100-plus troops in southern Syria.)
phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was both to withdraw US troops from a Kurdish-held part of Syria that Turkey wanted to invade and to deploy US troops to protect oil fields in eastern Syria. The net result was a
decline in the US troop presence in Syria, but — as Kilmeade of all people noted — not an actual pullout from the country.
said, “Look, we have no soldiers in Syria. We’ve won. We’ve beat ISIS. And we’ve beat them badly and decisively. We have no soldiers.”
December: Dishwashers
said this: “Dishwashers — we did the dishwasher, right? You press it — remember the dishwasher, you’d press it, boom, there’d be like an explosion, five minutes later you open it up, the steam pours out, the dishes. Now, you press it 12 times. Women tell me. Again, you know, they give you four drops of water. And they’re in places where there’s so much water, they don’t know what to do with it. So we just came out with a reg on dishwashers — we’re going back to you. By the way, by the time they press it 10 times, you spend more on water — and electric! Don’t forget. The whole thing is worse because you’re spending all that money on electric. So we’re bringing back standards that are great.”
deregulation push that will do damage to the environment.