If his lips are moving, he’s lying.
The New York Times fact-checked Trump’s 63-minute jabbering at a recent Las Vegas campaign stop and found 64 false, inaccurate or misleading remarks — one a minute. That mendacity wasn’t even a record. A contender for the distinction would be Trump’s 64-minute August news conference at Mar-a-Lago that was more monologue than Q&A: He racked up at least 162 lies, misstatements and vast exaggerations by NPR’s count — about 2.5 a minute.
And of course there’s the final tally on his presidency from the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, dispenser of those ignominious Pinocchios: a total 30,573 lies and misleading statements and tweets. That’s nearly 20 a day, starting on Day 1 with Trump’s lies about the size of his inauguration crowd and the weather — he denied it rained, when former President George W. Bush’s meme-worthy struggles with a poncho clearly proved otherwise — and, in his inaugural address, about the supposed “carnage” he’d inherited. (“That was some weird s—,” Bush muttered as he exited.)
Trump has been lying ever since, most ominously in still denying his 2020 defeat at virtually every rally. The dishonesty has mounted as he runs again for reelection. Pathological lying ought to be a disqualifier for the office, yet for nearly half the electorate it’s not. Sure, shading the truth is a feature of politics, not a bug. But lying on Trump’s scale is a bug, and a venomous one.
— Former president Donald Trump, in a campaign rally in Waunakee, Wis., Oct. 1
“Listen to these numbers though. These are the official numbers. These are certified numbers. … In total during her term, it’s not even believable, she [Kamala Harris] let in 13,099 convicted murderers. Some of them had murdered 10 people, some murdered seven, one murdered six. I’m looking at these. These are stone-cold killers, and they let in people that are worse than any criminal we have.”
— Trump, in a campaign rally in Erie, Pa., Sept. 29
Trump has a shining new talking point — an outrageously false claim that was ginned up by right-wing media and then embraced by the GOP nominee as an “official” fact.
Trump then embellishes the “fact” with additional falsehoods. Notice how he said he’d seen a list and some on it had murdered 10 people? There is no such list detailing the killings committed by the 13,099 people. That’s just a figment of his imagination.
Here’s the truth: Most of these killers are in detention, not prowling the streets, and have been since before Trump was president. It’s false to claim they entered during the Biden-Harris administration.
The Facts
On Sept. 25, acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director P.J. Lechleitner responded to a request from Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Tex.), made in March, for data on the number of noncitizens with criminal convictions on ICE’s non-detained docket. As of July 21, he wrote, there were 662,566 people with criminal histories (convicted or pending) not detained by ICE. In a breakdown by crime, he noted 13,099 people convicted of homicide were not detained by ICE.
Two days later, Gonzales tweeted the letter, highlighting the number of killers. “Americans deserve to be SAFE in our own communities,” he wrote. His tweet was immediately interpreted by right-wing media and the Trump campaign as saying these killers entered the country during the Biden administration and were on the loose and roaming the country.
But the letter did not say that these criminals were not in custody. The non-detained docket refers only to individuals not detained by ICE. In fact, in the same letter, Lechleitner told Gonzales that ICE’s detention capacity was 41,500 beds, showing there was not enough space to house these criminals. As of July 21, 277 beds were occupied by convicted killers. The Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that ICE could not detain people indefinitely.
So, with so little space available in ICE detention centers, many criminals convicted of serious crimes are shipped to another facility to serve out their terms. Some noncitizens on the non-detained docket may participate in the agency’s Alternatives to Detention programs, which generally track people with GPS monitoring devices or the SmartLINK phone app, but murderers would not qualify. A 2021 Biden administration memo made detention a priority for noncitizens who pose “a current threat to public safety.”
Moreover, these “noncitizens” include people who entered the country legally with a long-term nonimmigrant visa or earned permanent U.S. residency but were convicted of a crime. There’s no breakdown about how many on the non-detained docket entered the country illegally, but one cannot assume, as Trump does, that these are all undocumented immigrants.
The letter also did not say when the people on the list entered the country.
“The data in this letter is being misinterpreted,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement released Sept. 29. “The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this administration. It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.”
My favorite Lily Tomlin line is this one: "No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.”
I love it more today than ever, because it applies so perfectly to how we must respond to the campaign claims of Donald Trump and JD Vance. Especially Trump's assertions about his role — heroic, in his vision — in "saving" the Affordable Care Act and fighting the COVID pandemic.
To start by summarizing: Trump did everything in his power to destroy the Affordable Care Act, starting on the very first day of his term in 2017. On COVID, he did everything in his power to make America defenseless against the spreading pandemic.
Let's take them in order.
Here's what Trump said about the Affordable Care Act during his Sept. 10 debate with Kamala Harris: "I had a choice to make when I was president, do I save it and make it as good as it can be? Never going to be great. Or do I let it rot? ... And I saved it. I did the right thing."
Our rating: Altered
Experts and an AI-detection tool confirmed the image is AI-generated. There's no evidence Trump waded through flood water in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.
Trump flood picture is AI
Trump surveyed the damage from Hurricane Helene in the battleground state of Georgia on Sept. 30 and spoke to residents affected by the Category 4 storm, which killed at least 180 people and left almost a million homes and businesses without power.
But the image, which was shared the same day and shows the former president wading through a flooded street, isn't legitimate.
Closing with C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Tim Walz: January 6th was not Facebook ads. And I think a revisionist history on this. Look, I don't understand how we got to this point, but the issue was that happened. Donald Trump can even do it. And all of us say there's no place for this. It has massive repercussions. This idea that there's censorship to stop people from doing, threatening to kill someone, threatening to do something, that's not censorship. Censorship is book banning. We've seen that. We've seen that brought up. I just think for everyone tonight, and I'm going to thank Senator Vance. I think this is the conversation they want to hear, and I think there's a lot of agreement. But this is one that we are miles apart on. This was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen. And it manifested itself because of Donald Trump's inability to say, he is still saying he didn't lose the election. I would just ask that. Did he lose the 2020 election?
JD Vance: Tim, I'm focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?
Tim Walz: That is a damning. That is a damning non answer.
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Amna Nawaz:
We're learning previously undisclosed details tonight about former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
A newly unsealed 165-page court filing from the Department of Justice argues the former president should still face trial even after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled presidents have immunity for official acts.
NPR's Carrie Johnson and former U.S. attorney Mary McCord are following the latest developments. They join me now.
Welcome to you both.
So, Carrie, what do we know about why this filing was unsealed now by Judge Tanya Chutkan, and what stood out to you as you made your way through it?
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Carrie Johnson, NPR:
Yes, the Justice Department made this filing in response to what the Supreme Court did this past summer.
The Supreme Court ruled that Trump and future presidents do enjoy substantial immunity from prosecution for official acts. But the special counsel, Jack Smith, and his team maintain that Trump was acting as a political candidate and not the president of the United States when he allegedly attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
And this court filing today was filed under seal a short while ago. There's been some back-and-forth about how much the public should be able to see. And just this afternoon, Judge Tanya Chutkan mostly sided with prosecutors and released this filing with some redactions.
There are some new details in here based on grand jury testimony and notes that people like former Vice President Mike Pence took about his interactions with former President Donald Trump. There's some really interesting mentions of notes that Pence took about this all being up to Pence in the later part of 2020 and early 2021 as people prepared to count the electoral votes on January 6.
And there's some new detail from prosecutors, who maintain that Trump himself was in the dining room near the Oval Office tweeting on January 6 as Mike Pence was in danger from rioters in the Capitol. And Trump allegedly said to an aide who asked him about all this: "So what?"
So there's a lot of new color and vivid detail about Trump's alleged actions and his state of mind and his knowledge in those waning weeks of 2020 and early 2021.
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Amna Nawaz:
Mary, we knew this was an argument that Jack Smith was going to lay out, saying, even though Trump was holding the official office of president, his scheme, as he writes in the filing — quote — "was a fundamentally private one."
Just broadly speaking, how does he make that case here and how compelling a case is that?
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Mary McCord, Former Justice Department Official:
He goes through all of the different facets of the scheme the pressure on state legislatures, the pressure on his own vice president, the efforts to orchestrate the fraudulent electors scheme, and his comments not only at the Ellipse on the morning of January 6, but in the lead-up to that, including public speeches and tweets.
And he — and Jack Smith emphasizes at every step how many private actors, private attorneys, and advisers, including some of his co-conspirators, were involved in so many of these efforts. He also makes the point about there not being executive branch officials involved in these various efforts.
And he also adds, I think, some really interesting details, to go to Carrie's point about showing his capacity as a candidate. He adds details about, when he's pressuring state legislatures, for example, and state government officials, he is, for one, only pressuring Republicans. He never calls, for example, the Michigan Democratic governor or secretary of state to complain about election fraud.
He only pressures Republicans. And in those states that are led by Democrats, he instead pressures state legislatures. He constantly refers only to his own race when he talks about fraud in the election and never to the election more generally. So, in other words, claims of election integrity, you would expect to be calling into question a number of different facets of the election, but, instead, he focused only on himself.
So, Jack Smith really does paint quite a vivid picture throughout not only the first part of this motion, which includes this extensive factual recitation, but particularly in his legal analysis and his application of the law, the law that the Supreme Court laid down in Trump v. United States, to the facts of this case.
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Amna Nawaz:
Carrie, I want to underscore here that moment you briefly mentioned about Mr. Trump's reaction to learning that his vice president had been taken to a secure location. Here is what is actually written out in the filing related to that.
Jack Smith writes that: "Upon receiving a phone call, learning that Pence had been taken to a secure location, a redacted person rushed to the dining room to inform the defendants in hopes the defendant would take action to ensure Pence's safety. Instead, after he delivered the news, the defendant," in this case, former President Trump, "looked at him and said only: 'So what?'"
What else do we learn from this, Carrie, about the many efforts Vice President Pence made to offer then-President Trump an off-ramp from these false claims of election fraud?
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Carrie Johnson:
Yes, we learned a lot about conversations that Pence had with Trump, as well as Pence's aides, who met with some of Trump's alleged co-conspirators, people we believe to be former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, law professor John Eastman, and others who were advancing these bogus claims.
And after they tried all kinds of other efforts in the courts and with the states, they basically failed at all of those things, and it came down for them to Mike Pence. And so they placed enormous pressure on Pence, tried to signal that he had the power to overturn the will of millions of voters.
And Pence wasn't buying it. Nor was one of his legal aides who's testified before the house January 6 Committee. And we get a lot of detail about that. Pence basically says to Trump, why don't you try again? Take this — sit this one out. You can try again in 2024. And Trump and his top aides were just not having it.
In fact, Trump called Pence on January 5 and the morning of January 6 asked him to be tough. And Pence was under enormous pressure, as we saw in that period, but, still, he held firm and refused to go along with this alleged scheme.
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Amna Nawaz:
Mary, there are some newly disclosed details in here, some newly confirmed details. Much of it was also known from the results of the January 6 hearings. But the big question is, now what?
What kind of impact will this filing have on the case moving forward?
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Mary McCord:
Right.
So now it will be Mr. Trump's legal counsel's turn to file a response to this and make arguments in opposition to Jack Smith's arguments.
So he has argued that, for each facet of the scheme, Mr. Trump's conduct — well, first of all, for his pressure on his vice president, where the Supreme Court said that could — that's official, they have made a showing and an argument that they can rebut the presumption of immunity by showing through the evidence that prosecution for this illegal pressure on Mike Pence would not create any danger of intrusion the functions of the presidency.
For every other category, he argues that acts are private and not official. And even if the court were to find they were official, again, he can rebut the presumption of immunity by showing prosecution would have no danger of intrusion the functions of the presidency.
And this is something that Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in her concurring opinion, she pointed out some areas that she thought were private and said if she had — she thought the majority should have said so in its opinion, and some areas where she thought the presumption was rebutted.
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Amna Nawaz:
That is former U.S. attorney Mary McCord and NPR's Carrie Johnson joining us tonight.
Thank you to you both.
“I don’t usually gasp at things,” said MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin during an appearance with host Nicole Wallace on Wednesday on her show “Deadline: White House," but added, “We are learning facts that weren’t previously known to us.”
“I’ll read first what made Lisa Rubin gasp. Why make everybody wait?” Wallace said before going on to read from page 142 of the massive document, including a portion where Trump reportedly responded with, “So what?” when delivered the news that Mike Pence was taken to a secure location because of fears over his safety.
“The cavalierness with which Donald Trump received that news certainly is news to me,” Rubin said, adding that the new court filing contains more information than what has previously been released by the Jan. 6 committee investigation. “There is a whole lot of new content here Nicole and that is just one part of it.”
MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissman took it a step further when he called Trump’s actions after the 2020 election and in the lead-up to Jan. 6 the most serious crime “in American history.”
“What you have here is chapter and verse over and over again about an effort, a conspiracy – a criminal conspiracy – to thwart the will of the American electorate,” Weissman, a former FBI general counsel, told Wallace. “There is no more serious crime in American history than that.”
The lightly redacted filing argues that Trump’s scheme to use bogus election fraud claims to stop Biden from taking office “was fundamentally a private one” and did not involve “official conduct.” If the courts accept that argument, the indictment could survive the expansive presidential “immunity” standard invented by the Supreme Court in its controversial July 1 decision.
But regardless of the fate of Smith’s legal case, the motion matters politically. It bolsters the argument that Trump’s disregard for the Constitution, democracy, and the rule of law leave him unfit to return to office. And it functions as a reminder for distractible voters about the seriousness of the charges against the first election loser in American history to incite violence in bid to retain power.
Trump’s lawyers fought unsuccessfully in court to block release of the motion based on the claim that it could affect the election, an argument Chutkan, who has repeatedly said she does consider Trump’s status as a presidential candidate to be relevant to her proceedings, rejected. Smith also filed an appendix that includes FBI interviews, grand jury testimony, and other evidence, which remains sealed, though parts of that could also be made public before election day.
More evidence could come out in coming days. A hefty appendix accompanying Wednesday’s filing remains under seal, and the judge has asked both sides to weigh in on how much of it should be made public. Among the documents in the appendix are grand jury transcripts and notes from FBI interviews conducted during the yearslong investigation.
This is not a test. This is your emergency broadcast system announcing the commencement of the Annual Purge, sanctioned by the U.S. Government. Commencing at the siren, any and all crime, including murder, will be legal for 12 continuous hours.
That’s how “The Purge,” an annual —and thankfully fictional, at least for now — event held in a dystopian 2040 America is announced in a sequel of the long-running film series called, fittingly, The Purge: Election Year. The run of action horror films first launched in the early 2010s has become something of a B-movie sensation. Its pretense about a troubled America that tries controlled mayhem to stave off non-stop anarchy surely alarms some viewers — and thrills others. One thing I’m pretty sure about is that the producers didn’t mean for The Purge movies to serve as a policy white paper.
And yet here was Donald Trump, ex-president and GOP nominee for the last three elections, telling a smallish rally crowd in Erie, Pa. on Sunday afternoon that if returned to the White House, he will write his own sequel to The Purge — treating a violent Hollywood murder flick like it was the lost 31st chapter of Project 2025. The plot twist is that in Trump’s remake, everyday folks aren’t committing the crimes, but instead getting a whupping from an all-powerful police state.
- YouTubeyoutu.be
“See, we have to let the police do their job.” Trump said, even if “they have to be extraordinarily rough.” That was the start of a long, hard-to-follow ramble in which the Republican candidate claimed to have seen TV images of shoplifters walking out of stores with refrigerators or air conditioners on their backs — for which he blamed the permissive left. Trump’s solution would be “one really violent day” by the cops. Or even just “one rough hour. And I mean real rough. The word will be out. And it will end immediately...”
Well, as you can imagine, Trump’s call for a National Day of Violence — many commentators on X/Twitter compared it to an American Kristallnacht — caused an immediate frenzy. CBS News interrupted Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and the Kansas City Chiefs for a special report: “Trump’s Day of Violence.” New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn ran down the newsroom’s iconic red stairs and screamed at his top lieutenants to rip up tomorrow’s front page. And...
And, who am I kidding with this tired bit? Of course those things never happened. Most news organizations did mention the Trump rant — it was hard to ignore — but treated it as the umpteenth instance of Trump being Trump, and not as a dangerous escalation of national rhetoric. The future 2024 Word of the Year — sanewashing — came back this weekend in a big way among the handful of media critics exasperated at the lack of urgency.
“Trump constantly saying extreme, racist, violent stuff can’t always be new,” the New Republic’s Michael Tomasky wrote in an essay. “But it is always reality. Is the press justified in ignoring reality just because it isn’t new? Are we not allowed to consider his escalations as dangerous, novel developments in and of themselves? And should we not note the coincidence that his remarks seem more escalatory as the pressures of the campaign mount?”
America — and especially the media — should take Trump’s rants seriously and literally.
Tomasky and others noted that Trump’s hateful weekend comments about immigrants were just as troubling as his endorsement of violence. At a Saturday rally in the ironically named Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin (ironic because Trump hates chiens, or dogs), Trump unleashed a flurry of the kind of dehumanizing language that typically precedes ethnic cleansing. “I will liberate Wisconsin from this mass migrant invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs, and vicious gang members,” the GOP nominee claimed. He called migrants “animals,” and, most bizarrely, claimed that they “will walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.”
Sanewashing? “Trump pounds immigration message after Harris’ border visit,” was the headline in Axios, while Bloomberg tweeted that “Donald Trump sharpened his criticism on border security in a swing-state visit, playing up a vulnerability for Kamala Harris.” Really? Trump’s words sounds more like they were sharpened in the flames of a cross at a KKK rally than any kind of serious policy. Is it a vulnerability for Harris that her speeches about the border don’t sound like they were drafted by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels? What different election are these journalists watching than the one that’s actually happening?
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