As shown by PolitiFact, Trump told the truth in 2025 only slightly more often than the NY Jets won a football game. Have his lies been normalized? The Book of Proverbs assures us that truth will out.
The Trump administration can now add the newly minted coverup of the killing of Renee Nicole Good to its long list of active coverups and distortions of the truth.
Trump and Trumpism thrive in the world of cloudy, conflicting narratives, outlandish lies and “alternative facts.” As Timothy Snyder, the doyen of modern tyranny, has taught repeatedly since Trump first came to power, “Post-truth is pre-fascism…to abandon facts is to abandon freedom.” Considering that Trump’s lies totaled 30,573 over the four years of his first term, as counted by the Washington Post, it is miraculous that American democracy has stood up to the unrelenting pressure as well as it has. But it is teetering now more than ever.
Trump’s first term was only the “pants-on-fire” appetizer. The first year of Trump’s second term has been so filled with untruths that PolitiFact dubbed 2025 “The Year of the Lies.” Usually they pick a “Lie of the Year,” but the sheer volume of falsehoods made choosing a single "Lie of the Year" impossible.
It should be noted that PolitiFact’s nominees for “Lie of the Year” spanned the political spectrum:
In 2025, options for the top lie include Trump’s made-up math to justify deadly boat strikes off Venezuela’s coast, Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker’s disconnected assessment of food stamp "SNAP machines," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim of "no starvation" in Gaza, and a heaping of dishonest talking points on tariffs, the record-setting U.S. government shutdown, immigration raids and the Jeffrey Epstein files.
All are worthy candidates, but in the end, our Oval Office occupant is still the champ, the Sultan of Slander, GOAT of Gloat. When it came time for PolitiFact to share their three prime examples of what happened “when lies trampled real people,” they looked to healthcare, tariffs and immigration, and all pointed to the Liar-in-Chief:
A farmer couldn’t sell soybeans to his usual big foreign customer or plan for next year’s crop. A tit-for-tat trade war sparked by U.S. tariffs on China left a cloud of uncertainty.
A pediatrician quit her long practice of seeing patients in person. In clinical care’s already pressurized environment, the Trump administration’s unproved claims on everything from Tylenol to vaccines had added chaos and safety concerns to her days.
Two brothers, who came to the U.S. as children to escape gang violence in El Salvador, attended school, stayed out of trouble and complied with government check-ins, arrived at their most recent appointment only to be suddenly shackled, detained and deported. They and many others like them were not the “worst of the worst” criminals that the administration claimed would be the first to be shipped home.
And these are just the tip of the iceberg. Marking the end of the first year of his second term, CNN’s lie-meister Daniel Dale shared the top 25 whoppers and added, “It was hard to pick only 25. But it was easier than it used to be.”
Here’s PolitiFact’s scorecard of Trump’s statements that they scrutinized.
Nearly 80 percent of Trump’s claims were deemed either mostly or completely false, and another 11 percent only “half true.” By this measure, in 2025, Trump told the truth only slightly more often than the New York Jets won a football game.
Here are some of the most common assertions PolitiFact has fielded dover the past few weeks:
Daniel Dale added, “Trump’s lying has always been characterized by dogged repetition. It became especially repetitive in 2025. While he continued to regularly sprinkle in new lies, he relied on a core set of go-to fabrications he deployed virtually no matter the setting and no matter how many times they had been debunked.”
And this week, some enraging doozies, including blaming the victim of the Minneapolis ICE shooting, when video evidence clearly told a different story, and nearly everything being said about Venezuela.
You can see a digest of Trump’s lies during his second term in a Wikipedia entry, but it bears noting that apparently no one is keeping a daily tracker, as was done in Trump’s first term, indicating that Trump’s lies may have been normalized - not that we’ve come to accept them, but that we’ve come to expect them.
See also What Happened When Five AI Models Fact-Checked Trump (Yale Insights)
I don’t believe he’s worn us down. His false accusations against Renee Nicole Good, the Minnesota victim, fly in the face of so many who knew that she was “an amazing human being,” and his tasteless post-mortem attack on Rob Reiner just made him seem tone deaf - and showed that Trump not only is a liar, but a coward. He loves to attack dead people and those who otherwise can’t defend themselves, like women, people of color and those with intellectual challenges. But his lies have not been normalized, no matter how many we’ve had to absorb. They still have the power to enrage us - and engage potential voters.
On the other hand, his truthful statements, those times when he tells us what he’s really intending to do (like this week, claiming he would circumvent a Supreme Court ruling against his tariffs), are no less shocking than the lies. And they are coming more frequently, as we watch his already minimal filters dissolve in the face of an increasing rate of mental decline and his perceived invulnerability to legal or political consequences.
Jewish Sources on Trust and Truth
Trump’s deliberate degradation of truth is one of the many Jewish disqualifiers for his leadership. The Talmud states that the commandment “Do not steal” includes the prohibition against stealing a person’s trust with misleading words. It’s called G’nayvat Da’at. The sages delineated seven types of thieves, and the theft of truth and trust was considered the worst. While shading the truth is sometimes acceptable for the sake of peace (as in when complimenting a loved one’s appearance), that is clearly the exception to the rule. Long before it became a pillar of democracy and governance, truth telling was already a pillar in sustaining relationships, and the rabbis understood that.
Trump has perverted truth through his distortion of words.
According to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, whose yahrzeit (the Hebrew anniversary of his death) is today, “God lives in a word.” Judaism understands words to be bearers of holiness. We joke about Trump-invented words like “covfefe,” but it is no laughing matter that under Trump, words have taken a battering. Bigly. Trump’s Orwellian attack on truth has taken a terrible toll on words like “patriot,” “freedom,” “free and fair elections” and “religion.” He turns seditious rioters into “freedom fighters,” and victims of racism into “racists.” “Facts” were virally infected when the word “alternative,” was allowed to get within six feet, as it did early on.
When truth is lost, trust in our institutions erodes.
Trust and trust are inextricably linked. In the evening service, the prayer just after the Sh’ma begins with those two words, interlocked, “Emet V’Emunah,“ “truth and trust,” in Hebrew. They go hand in hand. The Talmud (Berachot 12a) notes that the word Emunah is included in the evening service in particular, because, in the words of Psalm 92, “It is good to give thanks unto God and to declare your trustworthiness at night (emunatecha balaylot).” When things are dark and murky, after the sun has gone down, the truth is much more difficult to discern. At times like that, when things are not so black and white, we have to rely on trust. The autocrat knows that once trust in government becomes muddy, trust in a single human being can fill that vacuum.
As we head into a year of make-or-break midterms, here’s a tidbit of biblical wisdom, perhaps some other-worldly proof that Donald Trump’s impact will be fleeting.
Check out these inspiring and hopefully prescient verses from Proverbs 12:
I especially love verse 19:
Truthful speech abides forever,
A lying tongue for but a moment.
For those aching for a return to normalcy over the coming months, to a world where up is up and down is down, let that verse be your mantra. Inscribe it the doorposts of your homes, upon your gates, on your front lawns and behind your goal posts, alongside your neighbor’s dusty John 3:16 sign.
This verse is so central to Jewish life that one of the pillars of 19th century Hasidism, Rebbe Yehuda Leib Alter of Ger, took the first two Hebrew words, “Sfat Emet” as the title of his monumental Torah commentary. His truths, like the Hebrew Bible’s, have stood the test of time.
Donald Trump’s lies will not.
The importance Jewish sources have always placed on trust and truth are a good part of the reason three quarters of American Jews did not side with Trump in 2024 - and never have and never will. America’s premier nonsectarian, Jewish-founded university, Brandeis, chose as its symbol and motto the Hebrew word “Emet,” “Truth,” because it is a core Jewish value. Perhaps THE core value. And they chose a verse from Psalm 51:
Some may occasionally fall for the hokum, but we ‘aint giving up that core value for no one. Our sources tell us that he will inevitably fail. "This is the punishment of the liar,” says the Talmud, “even when he speaks the truth, no one listens to him.” (Sanhedrin 89b).
The only question is how much damage Trump’s lies will continue to do before they are, at long last, vanquished.
If you don’t have enough space on your lawn sign for that entire selection from Proverbs 12, try out Exodus 23:7 – “Mid’var sheker yirchak,” “From a lying word, stay far away.”
The beauty of Hebrew is that, without changing a single letter, the line can also read, “Midaber sheker yirchak,” “From the speaker of lies, stay far away.”
Seems like Exodus is trying to tell us something.
Yes, but what about: "a lie can go around the world before truth gets its pants on." That's what this administration has been relying on, and getting away with unfortunately. Trying to get people to doubt what they have seen with their own eyes. Just a very depressing day. I am as sad as though it was my own child that was killed.
Thank you for enlightening us in these dark times.
It becomes unbearable every day I wake , to another catastrophic disaster he and this corrupt administration has gotten away with.
All outrageous, all very disturbing