Correcting Trump’s Unanswered Debate Lies
Biden couldn’t fact-check his opponent in real time. But Trump’s torrent of bullshit needs to be shown for what it was.
“I’VE NEVER SEEN ANYBODY LIE like this guy,” Donald Trump huffed in Thursday’s debate against President Joe Biden. “Everything he does is a lie.”
The accusation was comical. For ninety minutes, Trump spewed one howler after another as Biden stared, slack-jawed, in geriatric dismay. Biden tried to rebut some of his opponent’s fabrications but couldn’t keep up. Who can?
So let’s do what Biden couldn’t do. Let’s dig into Trump’s lies.
“I would have much rather accepted” the 2020 election results, “but the fraud and everything else was ridiculous.”
This, again? Among Trump’s many lies, this is the most incendiary and the most thoroughly debunked. The fact that he keeps repeating it, still enjoys the full support of his party, and continues to lead in the polls is a major warning sign to our country.
“I heard him [Biden] say before, ‘insulin.’ I’m the one that got the insulin down for the seniors.”
LOL. The $35 monthly cap on out-of-pocket Insulin costs under Medicare wasn’t passed until the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. (Trump did a mini-version of this, but it was sharply limited and voluntary: Drug plans could choose to opt out of the program.)
Biden “allowed millions of people to come in here from prisons, jails, and mental institutions.”
Bullshit. Trump’s allegation isn’t even statistically plausible.
“You had Roe v. Wade, and everybody wanted to get it back to the states. Everybody, without exception: Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives. Everybody wanted it back. . . . We brought it back to the states, and the country is now coming together on this issue.”
It takes a special kind of chutzpah to make statements about liberals that they can refute just by recalling their own anger at the fall of Roe and at the anti-abortion laws that followed.
“That was a made-up quote—‘suckers’ and ‘losers.” . . . He [Biden] made that up. . . . It was made up by him, just like Russia, Russia, Russia . . . He made up the ‘suckers’ and ‘losers,’ so he should apologize to me right now.”
Biden had nothing to do with divulging Trump’s contemptuous remarks about U.S. service members who died in war. Those remarks were leaked and confirmed by people who worked for Trump, including his former chief of staff.
Before January 6th, “I offered them 10,000 soldiers or National Guard. And she [then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi] turned them down. . . . And she now admits that she turned it down. . . . As Nancy Pelosi said, it was her responsibility, not mine. She said that loud and clear.”
This is all complete garbage. The part about Pelosi saying or implying that Trump bore no responsibility is an additional fabrication. The video of her remarks shows she said no such thing. In fact, she has repeatedly said the opposite. On Friday, responding to Trump’s mischaracterization of her in the debate, she added: “He’s a fool. He thinks I planned my own assassination? He’s sicker than I thought.”
The House January 6th Committee “destroyed and deleted all of the information they found, because they found out we were right. We were right. And they deleted and destroyed all of the information.”
Sigh. No, the evidence wasn’t deleted. You can find it here.
“Joe could be a convicted felon with all of the things that he’s done. . . . This man is a criminal.”
Trump is literally a convicted felon. Biden isn’t. House Republicans tried to find evidence of crimes by Biden, and they failed.
“He [Biden] gets paid by China. He’s a Manchurian candidate. He gets money from China.”
This is another wild allegation that House Republicans investigated and failed to substantiate.
“I didn’t have sex with a porn star.”
Look, we weren’t in the room. But, come on. In court, Stormy Daniels testified in detail about her encounter with Trump. Among other things, she identified the idiosyncratic contents of his toiletry bag. The jury ruled that Trump falsified business records to cover up hush money, which he paid to Daniels because he totally didn’t have sex with her.
“I feel that I’m in as good a shape as I was 25, 30 years ago. Actually, I’m probably a little bit lighter. But I’m in as good a shape as I was years ago.”
NATO was “going out of business. . . . Almost 100 percent of the money was paid by us. . . . We’re paying everybody’s bills.”
That’s more fiction. And NATO “going out of business” isn’t even possible. It’s a bankruptcy recidivist’s dumb idea of how a military alliance works.
Under Trump, “Iran was broke. They had no money for Hamas or Hezbollah, for terror, no money whatsoever.”
Really? The State Department’s recent annual review of such activity, Country Reports on Terrorism 2020 (released in December 2021), noted that Iran “provides up to $100 million annually in combined support to Palestinian terrorist groups, including Hamas.” The report’s analysis focused on the last year of the Trump administration.
“I was getting out of Afghanistan, but we were getting out with dignity, with strength, with power.”
In February 2020, Trump’s administration signed a deal with the Taliban to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners and withdraw all American forces from Afghanistan within fourteen months. That’s the deal that led to the U.S. withdrawal. Such strength! Such power!
“We have a border that’s the most dangerous place anywhere in the world.”
“He [Biden] made up the Charlottesville story [about Trump defending white nationalists], and you’ll see it’s debunked all over the place. . . . Every reasonable anchor has debunked it.”
Yeah, no. They haven’t.
“The only jobs he [Biden] created are for illegal immigrants and bounce-back jobs. They’re bounced back from the COVID.”
Employment numbers under Biden exceed the pre-pandemic peak by millions. And for obvious reasons, employers who hire undocumented immigrants are far less likely to report these employees. So it’s ludicrous to suggest that all the new jobs went to such people.
ONE CATEGORY OF LIES deserves special recognition: Trump accidentally debunking himself. Here are three examples.
1. COVID and inflation.
Trump bragged that during COVID, “we spent the money necessary so we wouldn’t end up in a Great Depression.” But then he claimed that inflation “blew up under his [Biden’s] leadership because they spent money like a bunch of people that didn’t know what they were doing. . . . He [Biden] caused this inflation. I gave him a country with no, essentially no inflation.”
Trump can’t have it both ways. He spent trillions on COVID relief and insisted on sending Americans bigger checks than Congress wanted. That contributed to the inflation that later surged under Biden. Another contributing factor was the supply chain crises that erupted because of Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic.
2. Ukraine fatalities.
Trump said that in Ukraine, “a lot of people are dead right now, much more than people know. You know, they talk about numbers. You can double those numbers, maybe triple those numbers. He [Biden] did nothing to stop it.” Then, two minutes later, Trump complained that Biden has “given $200 billion now, or more, to Ukraine. . . . Every time that [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy comes to this country, he walks away with $60 billion.”
The point of the aid, of course, was to help Ukraine defend itself from Russia’s invasion. So Trump is simultaneously alleging that Biden did nothing and that Biden did too much. As to Trump’s speculation about the death toll being two or three times what’s reported, he offered his usual amount of evidence: zero.
3. Ending the Ukraine war.
CNN’s Dana Bash asked Trump: “Putin says he’ll only end this war if Russia keeps the Ukrainian territory it has already claimed and Ukraine abandons its bid to join NATO. Are Putin’s terms acceptable to you?” Eventually, Trump replied: “No, they’re not acceptable.” But 30 seconds later, Trump promised, “I will have that war settled between Putin and Zelenskyy as president-elect before I take office.”
Trump’s position, in other words, is that he won’t accept Putin’s terms for ending the war—but that Putin will immediately agree to end the war.
It’s sad, for many reasons, that Biden couldn’t effectively rebut these lies. He needs to win this election, he needs to lead the country, and he didn’t look capable of doing either. But that doesn’t mean Trump should get a pass. No presidential candidate in American history has lied as ruthlessly and profusely as Trump. He thinks he can get away with it. Don’t let him.