Trump Just Changed the Narrative Again This Time From Corruption to Betrayal

President Donald Trump spent his first days in function pushing simulated claims most the size of his inauguration crowd.

He has spent the concluding weeks of his term blitzing the American people with falsehoods and far-fetched conspiracies every bit part of a failed attempt to overturn the election he lost — cementing his legacy as what fact checkers and presidential historians say is the most deceitful White House occupant always.

"I have never seen a president in American history who has lied so continuously and and so outrageously as Donald Trump, period," presidential historian Michael Beschloss said in an interview. "Dwight Eisenhower used to say one of the most of import tools a president of the United States has is that people believe what he says."

But that belief in the president's words has become increasingly dependent on the political political party to which a person belongs. Trump decries reports that are unflattering and facts that don't fit with his world view every bit "fake news," fueling a growing partisan information carve up on everything from the contagiousness of the coronavirus to the reliability of the media.

Trump's run for the presidency was fueled by political prominence gained by promoting the racist "birther" prevarication nearly President Barack Obama, and his 2022 victory was secured past a entrada rooted in false claims about immigrants and inner-city crime.

In one case in the White House, the president routinely fabricated false claims nearly everything from toilet flushes to tax reform. Some of Trump's false claims collection policy, while conspiracy theories were elevated in tweets and in public and individual conversations with strange leaders.

In the last year of his term, Trump's endless faux claims about the coronavirus dirty the U.S. response to the pandemic, which has killed 339,062 people every bit of Dec. 29, according to an NBC News count. The president's utterly groundless claim that the ballot was stolen from him delayed President-elect Joe Biden'south transition for weeks — hampering the incoming assistants's efforts to set for broad-scale vaccine distribution and endangering national security, co-ordinate to experts.

"After two centuries, it is impressive that Americans still are inclined to believe what a president tells them, especially at a moment of crisis," Beschloss said. "When a president breaks that bail of trust with the American people, it makes it harder for hereafter presidents to accept the kind of moral potency that enables them to protect united states."

NBC News has fact-checked Trump for more than 4 years. Based on thousands of hours of reporting and hundreds of reported fact checks, iv issues stand above the balance as the falsehoods that define the Trump presidency.

Covid-19

"But stay calm. Information technology will get away." - President Donald Trump, March 10, 2020

Dozens of times since the start of the outbreak that has killed 1.7 meg people effectually the earth, Trump publicly downplayed the severity of the novel coronavirus, suggesting it would go away on its ain, while comparing Covid-xix, the disease information technology acquired, to the seasonal flu.

"It's going to disappear. One day — information technology'south like a phenomenon — information technology will disappear. And from our shores, we — you know, information technology could get worse before it gets better. It could mayhap go away. We'll see what happens. Nobody really knows," Trump said Feb. 28, with dozens of cases just no known fatalities in the U.S.

"We're doing a swell job with information technology. And information technology will go abroad. Only stay calm. Information technology volition get away," Trump said March 10, when in that location were just over a k known infections and 30 deaths.

His view was disputed by public health experts, including the government's own elevation scientists, who predicted that even with a strong, coordinated response, the virus wasn't just going to "go away." Later, the journalist Bob Woodward revealed that Trump had told him at the aforementioned fourth dimension the president was publicly downplaying the virus'south severity, he knew it was more unsafe than the flu and "deadly."

After states enforced tough lockdown measures to slow the spread of the virus — wreaking havoc on the economy and putting millions out of piece of work to try and save lives with hospitals and emergency services overwhelmed — Trump pressured governors to reopen chop-chop, while experts cautioned confronting information technology. To back up his push, he falsely claimed cases were going down throughout the leap even as experts warned the virus was uncontrolled; in a news conference April 22, he lambasted coverage of experts who warned of a dangerous potential 2d moving ridge in the fall and the winter every bit "fake news."

A calendar month subsequently, Trump again said things were improving: "At some bespeak, information technology'll go away. Information technology may flare upwardly, and information technology may not flare upward. We'll have to come across what happens," he said May fifteen. By that point, at to the lowest degree one.5 1000000 Americans had been infected; 88,101 had died. The numbers decreased slightly in the summertime as cities that were habitation to early surges drove down their caseloads, but by the fall, the virus had taken root in nearly every U.Southward. community; regional surges have led to one steady nationwide increase.

Trump continued to compare the virus to the flu even after he recovered from Covid-19 himself in early on October.

In mid-Oct, as the nation readied for an expected winter surge, he tweeted: "Flu season is coming up! Many people every twelvemonth, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, dice from the Flu. Are we going to close down our Land? No, we accept learned to live with it, simply like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!"

His tweet inaccurately inflated flu deaths while downplaying the coronavirus's danger. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease skillful, has said Covid-nineteen is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu.

Trump also routinely spread misinformation about testing, the efficacy of masks, and potential and unproven treatments for the virus, once claiming that injections of antibacterial cleaning agents like bleach might clean the lungs of the virus.

10 months in, more than than 19.4 one thousand thousand people in the U.S. have been infected, but public polls evidence a partisan split up on the understanding of the basic facts about the virus, which a large number of Republicans still believe is no worse than the influenza. Numerous cases take been tied to large White House events.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, who appeared maskless at the White Firm before contracting Covid-19, has said multiple times since his recovery that he was incorrect — and lamented the politics driving anti-mask sentiment in a public service advert.

Voter fraud

"VOTER FRAUD IS NOT A CONSPIRACY THEORY, IT IS A FACT!!!" — President Donald Trump, Dec. 24, 2020.

When Trump won the Electoral College — and thus the presidency — in 2016, he told lawmakers he only lost the popular vote considering of millions of illegal votes. At that place was no show of that, something his ain lawyers noted in an election courtroom filing opposing the Greenish Party's recount efforts after the ballot, merely the new president was undeterred.

At the first of his administration in January 2017, Trump urged states to undertake more voter gyre maintenance in the name of rooting out fraud, stirring alarm over aggressive purges that voting rights advocates feared would disenfranchise eligible people. He so launched a commission to seek definitive proof of his claims of widespread fraud; the grouping disbanded without finding whatsoever proof of it.

Numerous academic studies and criminal investigations, too, have searched for widespread voter fraud over the years and come up empty-handed. Merely at that place is ample bear witness that restrictive voting laws aimed at preventing this declared fraud disproportionately disenfranchise voters of colour.

Just over three years later, as Biden was closing in on the Autonomous nomination and the rapid spread of Covid-19 was making clear the public health risks of people congregating at the polls, Trump began pushing a number of falsehoods specifically virtually voting past mail.

Throughout 2020, Trump baselessly claimed that changes brought on by the pandemic — namely the big-scale expansion of mail service-in voting in nigh states, led by governors of both parties — were fraudulent, or that they created opportunities for fraud or strange meddling. There are numerous safeguards that keep U.S. elections secure.

When Trump lost the full general election, he blamed voter fraud and sent his lawyers to courtroom to effort and reverse the results. In a free-wheeling news conference that lacked even a shred of show, his attorney, Rudy Giuliani, alleged everything from a "centralized" fraud scheme to election interference by foreign communists. Only a handful of fraud cases have been uncovered in cardinal states: in Pennsylvania, three Republicans have been charged with illegally voting.

The president's false claims of a rigged or stolen election accept non achieved the immediate goal of overturning the results. But many fear that Trump's refusal to accept his loss isdamaging to the overall health of America's democracy —some 68 percent of Republicans believe the election was "rigged," co-ordinate to a Reuters/Ipsos poll from mid-Nov.

Voting rights experts are sounding the warning over another consequence: a new flood of restrictive voting laws put forth by Republicans invoking widespread fraud no one tin can find. This scenario is already playing out in Texas, according to a report past the Texas Tribune. In Georgia, the GOP has promised a number of restrictions, including rolling back the absentee voting arrangement Republicans there implemented a decade ago. These laws have the potential to significantly suppress legitimate votes, multiple experts have warned, and will particularly damage Blackness people and voters of color more than generally.

Trump "amplified the public conversation around voter fraud, he fabricated that more than of a household conversation, and he has increased the salience of voting restrictions for his supporters," Wendy Weiser, a national voting rights proficient who directs the Commonwealth Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU Schoolhouse of Law, said in an interview this month. "In that way, he made it a lot worse."

Russia'due south interference in the 2022 election

"This Russia matter with Trump and Russia is a made-upwards story," Trump said May 11, 2018.

From Twenty-four hour period Ane, Trump has disputed what the U.S. intelligence community has concluded equally a fact: Russia interfered in the 2022 U.S. ballot with the goal of boosting his bid while working to tear downwardly his Autonomous opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

He repeatedly called the and then-special counsel Robert Mueller'due south 2-year probe into the matter a "witch hunt" confronting him and the inference itself a "hoax," despite clear and sizable evidence that the Russian authorities worked to influence the event of the election "in sweeping and systematic fashion," as Mueller's report ended. Multiple people were indicted as a result of the investigation, including a old Trump campaign aide, while other shut Trump associates were charged with unrelated crimes uncovered in the form of Mueller's probe.

The report gathered evidence that the president worked to stymie the investigation, but determined that the Section of Justice could non charge a sitting president and therefore would not decide whether he had cleaved the constabulary. Trump, meanwhile, falsely claimed that Mueller'southward report "totally exonerated" him from any wrongdoing, including allegations of his entrada's "collusion" with Russian federation.

When asked directly if the special counsel did "actually totally exonerate the president," Mueller said "no."

In the 2nd half of his presidential term, Trump began to enhance a conspiracy theory that Ukraine and the Democrats framed Russia for ballot interference in an effort to discredit his win. At the aforementioned time, Trump also began to advance a theory that Biden, and so a probable 2022 front-runner, had acted corruptly while serving as vice president to benefit his son Hunter'south foreign concern interests. In that location is no prove of wrongdoing by either Biden.

Comments virtually these conspiracy theories — made in public, as well as in an infamous private phone telephone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in July 2019, when Trump asked for an investigation into the Bidens — would eventually trigger Trump'due south impeachment, afterward Democrats in the House concluded that he had abused the power of the presidency by seeking foreign assistance with his upcoming ballot.

The conspiracy theory that Russia was being framed for election interference, a version of which was first publicly posted on a far-correct message board, 4chan, in March 2017, fit into Trump'south yearslong effort to discredit Mueller's investigation and undercut the idea that a foreign government helped get him elected. But according to the Trump assistants'southward own experts, he played into a narrative advanced past Russia.

Trump's former Russian federation expert, Fiona Hill, called the thought that Ukraine meddled in 2022 a "fictional narrative" promoted by Russian intelligence and rebuked House Republicans for using it to defend the president against impeachment. Trump, and members of the GOP, have contended that the deportment his administration took toward Ukraine were motivated non by political or personal involvement, just by legitimate concern well-nigh corruption in that country, including alleged Ukrainian election interference.

"In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you lot please not promote politically driven falsehoods that and so clearly advance Russian interests," Colina said in her opening statement to Congress. "I reject to exist part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian regime is a U.S. adversary, and that Ukraine — not Russia — attacked us in 2016."

The Trump calendar

"Republicans will e'er protect people with pre-existing atmospheric condition," Trump said Oct. 20, 2018.

Throughout his term, Trump fabricated sweeping and false claims to eternalize his own policy agenda and exaggerate the extent of his accomplishment. He overstated his achievements on everything from tax reform to manufacturing investments.

Later instituting tariffs on Chinese goods, Trump boasted of raking in millions from China; in fact, Americans pay the bulk of tariffs on foreign goods. He argued that Obama's policies had greatly hurt Maine's lobster trade and declared he'd saved the industry with a trade deal. In fact, it is Trump's trade war that pinched the manufacture.

Trump often took credit for the nation's economic recovery and inaccurately claimed the economic system was struggling when he took office. In fact, the recovery began during Obama's administration and continued under Trump. After the economic system took an enormous striking when the pandemic hitting and prompted mass layoffs, Trump boasted of summertime returns as new growth.

Every bit a candidate, Trump vowed to build a southern border wall and brand Mexico pay for it. As president, he'south congenital 423 miles of border wall, much of it in identify of older existing border structures. Mexico has not paid a cent, despite the president's simulated claims to the contrary.

And in what is perhaps 1 of his most bold-faced falsehoods, Trump argued for years Republicans were defenders of people with pre-existing atmospheric condition, all the while his assistants and several blood-red states sued to overturn the Affordable Care Act, the Obama-era wellness care constabulary that guaranteed those protections, without proposing a plan with comparable protections.

Repeatedly, Trump has inaccurately summed up the successes of his assistants. During a major speech at the Un, he said his assistants had achieved more than any other. The assembled world leaders laughed.

"Didn't expect that reaction," Trump said at the fourth dimension. "But that's OK."

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Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-versus-truth-most-outrageous-falsehoods-his-presidency-n1252580

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