If Trump and his minions said it, it’s probably a lie
By Dave Zweifel
Oct 22, 2025
It’s mystifying how so many of our top elected leaders blatantly lie and, unbelievably, get away with it.
Yes, politicians have lied repeatedly throughout our country’s history. Even George Washington, the myth notwithstanding, told a fib or two. And who will ever forget Bill Clinton’s, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”
But the practice has morphed into an art form. And with the fracturing of the “news” media, where falsehoods are repeated nonstop, there are no longer guardrails while all too many Americans gullibly swallow the lies.
They can’t be dismissed as “fibs” any more. They are out-and-out lies, and those telling them know full well what they’re doing. They have come to learn that if they tell those lies enough times, millions of people will come to accept them as the God’s truth.
Take this month’s government shutdown as the most recent example.
Democrats took advantage of the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster rule to block extending the Republican budget that next year will halt health care coverage for roughly 20 million people. With control of Congress and the White House in the hands of Donald Trump, it was their only leverage to save Medicaid coverage and ObamaCare supplements for low-income American families.
That’s when the lying started, and it was carefully coordinated. Because when the truth is that Republicans cut health care to finance tax breaks for corporations and the billionaires that run them, it’s wise to come up with a fake story.
Vice President JD Vance, House Speaker Mike Johnson and a chorus of Senate Republicans — all amplified by the “fair and balanced” Fox News network — claimed that the Democrats shut down the government “to give free health care to illegal aliens.”
Trump went so far as to post a fake AI meme in which a fake Chuck Schumer makes the fake statement, “If we give all these illegal aliens free health care, we might be able to get them on our side so they can vote for us.”
As former Philadephia Inquirer columnist, now Substack author, Dick Polman observed, “The ‘free health care for illegal aliens’ lie is the new ‘immigrants are eating our dogs and cats.'”
“For starters,” he continued, “it requires five seconds of cognitive thought to realize how brazenly stupid the lie really is. What political party, except one bent on committing political suicide, would ever propose spending billions of taxpayers’ money on giving free health care to millions of undocumented immigrants — and shutting down the government (thus imperiling many federal services and federal workers’ jobs) in a bid to advance such a scheme?
“Besides, it couldn’t happen anyway because it’s illegal — and the Democratic party alone still respects and hews to the rule of law. Undocumented people are expressly prohibited by law from signing up for federally-financed health insurance. They can’t get Medicaid. They can’t sign up for Obamacare coverage.
“They can’t sign up for Medicare. They can’t sign up for the Children’s Health Insurance Program. And not a single syllable in the Democrats’ budget plan even hints that the millions of undocumented people should be granted eligibility for any federal health care.”
But despite the facts, the lie works. Social media postings, fringe websites and internet chats bemoan the stupid Democrats who want to give “those damn illegals” health coverage.
They also agree with Vance’s claim that the reason Americans have to wait so long at emergency rooms is because they’re jammed up with immigrants getting free care. Vance knows, or at least he should, that hospital ERs are required to treat everyone who shows up. It’s a law signed in 1986 by the conservative’s old hero, Ronald Reagan.
But the lies feed the narrative that the administration is employing to build public support for its efforts to indiscriminately deport immigrants. Trump once lied that the deportations were aimed at criminals, drug dealers, rapists and sex perverts, but now it’s the guy with the Spanish accent who has been selling tacos from his truck for the past 10 years in downtown Chicago.
In order to provide cover for its unprecedented invasion of America’s largest cities by federalized military troops, Trump claims that Portland and Los Angeles are burning, Chicago is being overrun by mobs hindering ICE agents, Washington, D.C., is a war zone.
A bemused Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker parodied Trump by noting, among other absurdities, that, “People are being forced to eat hot dogs with ketchup on them.”
Some claim that Trump perfected the lie with his never-ending claim that he actually won the 2020 presidential election. But even before that the Washington Post tabulated that Trump had uttered 30,573 lies during his first term alone. He’s well on his way to bettering that record since he resumed office just 10 months ago.
One whopper was issued just the other day when Trump claimed that Joe Biden had sent undercover FBI agents — 276 to be exact — to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to incite the insurrection that occurred that day.
Trouble is, Joe Biden wasn’t president then. Donald Trump was.