We Need to Talk About the Lying

During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised the moon. He promised he would not cut Social Security. He vowed to protect Medicare. He promised free in vitro fertilization. He disavowed the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and promised that he had “nothing” to do with it. He promised he would lower the cost of housing, groceries and other necessities. He promised cheaper eggs.

He promised, he promised and he promised.

But the president is not known for his honesty. Just the opposite: He is notorious for stiffing people and reneging on contracts. And true to form, almost none of the promises Trump made to the American people — the promises he made to win a second term in office — were truthful. Virtually all of them were lies.

We know they are lies because his administration has, thus far, done the precise opposite of what he said he would do. Project 2025 is serving as the blueprint for his effort to unravel the federal administrative state and one of its architects, Russell Vought, leads the Office of Management and Budget.

Trump’s allies, specifically Elon Musk, are taking an ax to the offices that run the programs — such as Social Security — that the president said he would protect. And the Republican budget framework, which the White House supports, would require hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, which would harm millions of the president’s supporters.

Trump’s plan for large tariffs on the United States’ most important trading partners — Canada, Mexico and China — would raise the price of goods for most Americans. And it should be said that the cost of eggs is projected to rise to all-time highs. There is no free IVF, no serious plan to end taxes on tips, and no housing assistance for working Americans. At best, the president’s most prominent supporters have cultivated a fantasy that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency will distribute stimulus checks drawn from supposed savings to taxpayers.

I say “supposed” because those “savings” are vastly overstated.

Those of us in the business of professional political commentary are not so comfortable labeling lies as lies and liars, liars. To say that something is a lie is to make a claim about a person’s mental state, and that takes evidence we may not have. But while it’s true that we cannot peer into the psyches of politicians and public figures, we do have the help of past behavior. And Donald Trump’s past behavior tells us that he is a liar who will say whatever he needs to get a vote.