CNN points out that Trump blatantly publicly lies a lot, including about stuff he is on the record as saying or doing.
On Saturday, President Donald Trump told reporters that he was “looking at” a new Iranian peace proposal. Then a reporter reminded Trump that he had said the previous night that the US might be better off not making a deal with Iran.
“Well, I wouldn’t have to. I didn’t say that,” Trump responded. “I said that if we left right now, it would take them 20 years to rebuild. But we’re not leaving right now. We’re gonna do it so nobody has to go back in two years or five years.”
In reality, Trump did say — on camera — what the reporter told him he said. His denial was yet another case in which the president wrongly asserted he hadn’t said something he had said in a public forum.
And “wrongly asserted” is journalistic code for “lied”.
It’s one thing for the president to try to deny having made a remark someone claimed he made in a private meeting. For years, Trump has attempted something more brazen: denying he ever made remarks the public saw him make.
In December 2025, for example, when an ABC News reporter asked Trump on camera whether he would release the video of the US military’s controversial follow-up strike on an alleged drug-trafficking boat in the Caribbean, Trump said, “I don’t know what they have, but whatever they have we’d certainly release, no problem.” But when another ABC News reporter reminded him five days later that he said he would have no problem releasing the video, Trump falsely claimed, “I didn’t say that. That’s — you said that, I didn’t say that. This is ABC fake news.”
Mind you, he does talk so much, and at such high speed and with so little thought, it must be very difficult for him to keep track of what he has and hasn’t said.
During his 2024 campaign, Trump falsely denied he had said “lock her up” about his 2016 election opponent, Hillary Clinton, though he had done so on multiple occasions at televised rallies attended by thousands of people. During the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, he denied having made two remarks he had made on camera the previous week.
The previous week? He’ll have said millions of things since then, how can we expect him to keep track of them all?
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