As of August 7, 2017, Donald J. Trump will have been in office as president of the United States for 200 days. This period of time will largely be remembered for the rancor and distrust sewn between his administration, the media, and the general public, as well as any numbers of investigations, scandals, and gaffes of various size and degree (occurring both on Twitter and in real life), but what stands out in perhaps the highest relief have been the falsehoods. (And his unconscionable perversion of the exclamation point.) Without further ado, a trio of Vogue contributors list what they believe to be Trump’s greatest hits: his most memorable, notable, or otherwise mind-boggling lies, from crowd size to James Comey. Follow along to see if your favorite made the cut!
“Nobody knows” if Russia interfered in the 2016 election.Trump has refused to accept that Russian intelligence agents were behind the cyber attacks on Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, and targeted voter registration software during the 2016 election in an attempt to sway the result. The hack “could’ve been China” or “a lot of different groups,” Trump said on CBS’s Face the Nation in April. “It’s very hard to say who did the hacking.” Actually, not really: The U.S. intelligence community, including the CIA, FBI, and DNI (director of national intelligence), has all but unanimously found Russia to be responsible.
Millions of illegal votes were cast in the 2016 election.According to the president, between 3 and 5 million fraudulent votes were cast in the 2016 election. Funny enough, Trump began levying this charge, with absolutely no evidence, after the news broke that he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by about 3 million votes. (Insecure much?) He’s argued on Twitter that he would have won the popular vote, “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” This claim has even led Trump to form a voter fraud commission purporting to investigate his allegations; at least 44 states have said they will not comply with that commission’s request to turn over its voter rolls.
Trump boasted the largest inauguration crowd ever. Period.Then-press secretary Sean Spicer got off to a shaky start trumpeting this Trump lie to the media during his first week on the job, saying the crowd for Trump’s inauguration was “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.” This was swiftly debunked, as estimates found Trump drew roughly a third of the 1.8 million people who watched President Obama’s historic swearing-in in 2009.
Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski begged him to come “to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me” and Trump said no.In fact, Scarborough and Brzezinski said, Scarborough alone joined Trump for dinner one night and the couple returned another night to give Trump a brief hello. Trump’s own tweets on the matter exposed his lie: If he “said no” to their pleas to visit, how could Trump have known what Brzezinski’s face looked like?
Trump never asked then-FBI Director James Comey to drop the investigation into then-national security adviser Michael Flynn.Through his attorney, the president says he never asked Comey to call off his probe into Flynn’s Russian contacts. Unfortunately for the president, Comey took contemporaneous notes of his meetings with the president, memorializing that Trump demanded “loyalty” and said he “hoped” Comey could “let the [Flynn investigation] go.” Lesson learned: Don’t mess with a (scrupulously organized!) career law enforcement official.
Comey was a “showboat” who was not well-liked or well-respected within the FBI.Comey defended his reputation against Trump’s burns in his public testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, saying, “Those were lies, plain and simple.” Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who assumed the job after Trump fired Comey, backed up Comey’s account, saying that he enjoyed “broad support within the FBI and still does to this day,” adding that “the vast majority of FBI employees enjoyed a deep, positive connection to Director Comey.”
Trump fired Comey on the recommendation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.In his (suspicious) initial explanation for ousting Comey, the president said that Comey mishandled the probe into Clinton’s emails (despite having previously praised his “guts” in that very situation). But Trump quickly contradicted himself, telling NBC’s Lester Holt, “I was going to fire Comey—my decision. There is no good time to do it, by the way . . . I was going to fire regardless of recommendation.”
Donald Trump Jr. was “open and transparent” about his June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower.Sure, if by “open and transparent” he means Trump Jr. first denied the meeting, then little by little changed his story as The New York Times revealed more and more details about what really happened. Jr. first conceded he’d met the lawyer, then added that they’d met about Russian adoptions, and finally, when the Times said they’d publish his email chain, admitted he met with the lawyer after being promised incriminating intel on Hillary Clinton. Withholding information until news reports prove you to be lying? Not-so-much transparent.
“Donald Trump Jr. is a good ‘boy.’ ”In fact, Trump Jr. is a 39-year-old man, and father of five.
Trump will release his tax returns as soon as the supposed “routine audit” into his finances is complete.Or at least, that’s what he kept saying during the campaign. Cut to earlier this year, and the president has already reneged, saying in an interview with The Economist that he “doubt[s]” he’d release his returns after all because “nobody cares about my tax return except for the reporters,” and adding, “maybe I’ll release them after I’m finished because I’m very proud of them, actually.” His communications director, Hope Hicks, had to remind him of his original promise with an awkward nudge: “Once the audit is over.”
There was some sort of crime or attack by undocumented immigrants in Sweden.“You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden,” Trump said at a Florida rally in February. “Sweden. Who would believe this? Sweden. They took in large numbers [of undocumented immigrants]. They’re having problems like they never thought possible.” This was a baffling statement to the viewing public—and Swedish officials, as there was no incident at all that had occurred in the country.
Trump isn’t for cutting taxes for the rich.“The people I care most about are the middle-income people in this country, who have gotten screwed,” Trump told The Wall Street Journal this week. “And if there’s upward revision, it’s going to be on high-income people.” Sounds nice, but in reality, Trump has endorsed policies that will amount to a gigantic tax cut for the rich—so much so that “40 percent of the benefit of his proposals would accrue to the highest-earning 1 percent,” according to the Tax Policy Center.
Undocumented immigrants are “animals” who “slice” and “dice” teenage girls.The president evidently doesn’t know the difference between undocumented immigrants and undocumented immigrant gang members.
We are going to repeal and replace Obamacare “quickly,” easily, on “day one.”LOL.
January 23: “Between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes caused me to lose the popular vote.” There has never been any evidence of this.
January 28: “The coverage about me in the @nytimes and the @washingtonpost has been so false and angry that the Times actually apologized to its dwindling subscribers and readers.” There is no apology on record.
February 3: “Professional anarchists, thugs and paid protesters are proving the point of the millions of people who voted to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” I, and the millions of others who have taken to the streets, are still waiting for our checks.
February 7: “And yet the murder rate in our country is the highest it’s been in 47 years, right? Did you know that? Forty-seven years.” It is not.
February 9: “Chris Cuomo, in his interview with Sen. Blumenthal, never asked him about his long-term lie about his brave ‘service’ in Vietnam. FAKE NEWS!” This was, in fact, Cuomo’s first question in the interview.
February 18: “You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?” Nothing happened the previous night in Sweden.
March 4: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” No, it isn’t—there is no evidence to support this, and it has been roundly denied by the government.
May 12: “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”Trump subsequently admitted that there are no tapes, whatever Comey did or did not hope.
June 4: “At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is ‘no reason to be alarmed!’ ” The mayor was, in fact, referring to the increased police presence following the attack, not the attack itself.
July 10: “When I left Conference Room for short meetings with Japan and other countries, I asked Ivanka to hold seat. Very standard.”This is absolutely not standard.
July 16: “The ABC/Washington Post Poll, even though almost 40% is not bad at this time, was just about the most inaccurate poll around election time!”This poll is considered quite accurate, and for the record, Trump was at 36, not 40, percent.
July 17: “We’ve signed more bills—and I’m talking about through the legislature—than any president, ever.” Clinton, Carter, Truman, and F.D.R. had all signed more at the same point.
July 19: “But the FBI person really reports directly to the president of the United States, which is interesting.” No, he doesn’t he reports to the attorney general.
July 19: “So pre-existing conditions are a tough deal. Because you are basically saying from the moment the insurance, you’re 21 years old, you start working and you’re paying $12 a year for insurance, and by the time you’re 70, you get a nice plan. Here’s something where you walk up and say, ‘I want my insurance.’ ”This has absolutely nothing to do with the way health insurance works.
“With the exception of the late, great Abraham Lincoln, I can be more presidential than any president that’s ever held this office.”Nope.