Opinion: The Lies We Tell. The Truths We Don’t.

Source: Silicon Bay Partners’ staff with assistance from ChatGPT
Photo: White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks with reporters in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, July 23, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

Two Trump presidencies. Two White Houses. And a podium that increasingly became a place where facts went to die. There was a time when the White House press briefing room was supposed to serve a fairly straightforward purpose: The administration spoke, reporters asked questions, and the American public got answers.

Not necessarily answers everyone liked. Not necessarily answers that made the president look good. But answers that were, at least in theory, supposed to be grounded in reality.

During Donald Trump’s two presidencies, that tradition has taken a beating.

The problem isn’t that politicians occasionally exaggerate. They always have. Presidents have spun bad economic numbers, exaggerated accomplishments and put the most favorable possible interpretation on questionable decisions since the Republic was young.

Trump’s approach has been different in scale, persistence and purpose.

His first administration produced so many false and misleading statements that The Washington Post Fact Checker eventually counted 30,573 during his four years in office, an average of roughly 21 per day. The number accelerated dramatically as his presidency progressed, reaching about 39 claims a day during his final year.

And the White House podium became an important part of that machinery. The names changed. The strategy didn’t.

Welcome to the Ministry of Messaging

Sean Spicer had the unfortunate distinction of becoming Trump’s first press secretary. His debut briefing set the tone.

Following Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, Spicer insisted that the event had drawn the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration. Photographs and transit data quickly demonstrated otherwise. It was a remarkably unnecessary fight.

Nobody’s presidency depended on whether 500,000 people or 1.5 million people showed up. But that was precisely the point.

The administration was willing to fight over an easily verifiable fact because conceding even a small point appeared to be unacceptable.

Spicer’s successor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, continued the pattern. One of the most memorable examples came during the controversy surrounding FBI Director James Comey’s firing, when Sanders told reporters she had heard from “countless” FBI agents who supported Comey’s dismissal. No evidence was produced to substantiate that claim.

The message was clear: The briefing room wasn’t necessarily where the administration explained reality. It was where the administration defended its version of reality.

Then came COVID

The pandemic produced some of the most consequential examples of presidential misinformation in modern American history.

Trump repeatedly minimized the threat of COVID-19 even as his administration’s own officials recognized the danger.

He promoted unproven treatments, including hydroxychloroquine, and publicly speculated about injecting disinfectant into the human body—comments that drew widespread condemnation from medical professionals.

His administration also repeatedly attempted to portray the government’s response as more successful than the underlying data suggested. This wasn’t merely political spin.

During a public-health emergency, misinformation could affect whether people sought treatment, followed public-health guidance or believed the seriousness of a rapidly spreading disease.

The stakes were no longer simply political. People’s health was involved.

The Big Lie Gets a Briefing-Room Address

But no subject better demonstrates the danger of political falsehoods than the 2020 election. Trump lost the election. He nevertheless claimed it had been stolen.

The claims were repeatedly rejected by courts, election officials—including Republicans—and Trump’s own Justice Department leadership.

Yet the administration continued to push the narrative. The consequences were historic.

The false claims about election fraud helped create the political environment that culminated in January 6, 2021.

The lesson was disturbing: A lie doesn’t have to be believed by everyone to be dangerous. It only has to be believed by enough people.

Term Two: Same Script, New Cast

Trump returned to the White House in January 2025.

And if anyone expected the second administration to develop a newfound affection for boring old facts, they haven’t been paying attention.

Karoline Leavitt became Trump’s fifth White House press secretary. At 27, she was the youngest person ever to hold the position.

She also quickly demonstrated that the Trump-era briefing room had evolved. The press secretary wasn’t simply expected to answer questions. She was expected to fight the question.

Journalists were frequently accused of bias, dishonesty or bad faith. Conservative media personalities received greater access and visibility, while the administration increasingly challenged traditional press institutions.

The White House even created a website devoted to identifying what it described as misleading media coverage, complete with sections such as “Media Offender of the Week” and a “Hall of Shame.”

That tells us something important about the administration’s communication strategy. The argument isn’t merely: “We’re right.”

It increasingly becomes: “Anyone who says we’re wrong is the enemy.”

The $50 Million Condom Fantasy

One of Leavitt’s earliest briefings produced a perfect example.

On January 28, 2025, she told reporters that DOGE and the Office of Management and Budget had discovered $50 million in taxpayer money that was about to fund condoms in Gaza.

She called it “a preposterous waste of taxpayer money.” Trump repeated the claim the following day, saying the money was being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas and suggesting the condoms could be used to make bombs. There was a problem. The claim wasn’t supported by evidence.

The organization identified as receiving the USAID money said it had not used U.S. funds to procure or distribute condoms. FactCheck.org and the Associated Press both concluded that the administration had not demonstrated that $50 million had been designated for condoms in Gaza.

It was a spectacular example of how a tiny—or nonexistent—piece of information can become a major political talking point. And once it gets repeated from the White House podium, it acquires an aura of authority. Even when it isn’t true.

“Tariffs Are a Tax Cut”

Then came tariffs. On March 11, 2025, Leavitt told reporters:

“Tariffs are a tax cut for the American people.” PolitiFact rated the claim False. The basic problem is arithmetic. Tariffs are taxes imposed on imported goods. While the economic effects can be complicated—and businesses and consumers can share the ultimate burden—the tariff itself isn’t a tax cut for Americans.

Calling a tax a tax cut doesn’t make it one. But repetition can make almost anything sound plausible. That’s one of the great strengths of political messaging: You don’t necessarily have to prove something. You just have to repeat it often enough that people stop asking whether it’s true.

The Deficit That Apparently Doesn’t Exist

In May 2025, Leavitt defended Trump’s tax and spending legislation by telling reporters that it “does not add to the deficit.”

PolitiFact rated that claim False. Again, this wasn’t an obscure philosophical disagreement.

The federal budget can be modeled. Revenue can be estimated. Spending can be estimated. The Congressional Budget Office can score legislation. You can argue about the assumptions. You can argue about the projections. You can argue about whether economic growth will offset some of the cost.

But saying a major tax-and-spending bill doesn’t add to the deficit when budget analyses project otherwise isn’t an alternative interpretation of arithmetic. It’s an alternative interpretation of reality.

And Then There Was the Egg Problem

At that same January 2025 briefing, Leavitt blamed an egg shortage on the Biden administration and the Agriculture Department, saying they had directed the mass killing of more than 100 million chickens.

PolitiFact rated that claim Half True rather than completely false because millions of birds had indeed been culled as part of the government’s response to avian influenza. But the crucial distinction was that the culling was driven by the bird-flu outbreak, not by a political directive to eliminate chickens for some unrelated purpose.

This is an important category of political misinformation. Not every falsehood is a gigantic fabrication. Sometimes the trick is taking a real fact and attaching a false explanation to it. The chickens died. The administration’s explanation for why they died was the problem.

The Second-Term Misinformation Machine

The examples extend well beyond the podium.

Trump has repeatedly made inaccurate or misleading claims about inflation, energy, immigration, trade, foreign policy, elections and the federal government.

The Associated Press documented numerous false or misleading claims during Trump’s first year back in office, including claims about Greenland, inflation, NATO, wind power, coal, international conflicts and the 2024 election.

FactCheck.org’s year-end review similarly identified Trump’s recurring falsehoods and distortions as a defining feature of 2025, including claims involving tariffs, employment data and foreign aid. And the election lie never really went away.

Trump has continued to repeat the debunked claim that the 2020 election was stolen, while also portraying his 2024 victory as a landslide. The Associated Press has documented the factual problems with both assertions.

The Press Secretary’s Impossible Job

There is an uncomfortable truth here. A White House press secretary has an extraordinarily difficult job. Every administration wants its accomplishments emphasized. Every administration wants its failures minimized. Every president wants reporters to ask friendly questions. And every press secretary is, to some degree, a political advocate. That’s not new.

What’s different is what happens when defending the administration becomes more important than accurately informing the public. At that point, the press secretary stops functioning primarily as a conduit between the government and the public. The podium becomes a political weapon.

And the Media Has a Problem, Too

The media can’t completely escape responsibility.

Trump’s statements generate enormous coverage precisely because they generate enormous attention. A shocking claim produces clicks. A confrontation with a reporter produces video clips. A ridiculous statement becomes a headline. The result is a perverse incentive: The more outrageous the statement, the more coverage it receives. And once the statement becomes the story, the correction rarely receives comparable attention.

Trump’s communications strategy has therefore benefited from an environment in which misinformation travels faster than corrections. That isn’t solely a Trump problem. It’s a modern media problem. But Trump has become extraordinarily effective at exploiting it.

The Greatest Lie May Be That Facts Don’t Matter

Perhaps the most dangerous development isn’t any individual falsehood. It’s the growing belief that truth itself is partisan.

If a Democrat says something, Republicans may assume it’s propaganda. If a Republican says something, Democrats may assume it’s propaganda. If a newspaper reports something damaging to your preferred candidate, you dismiss the newspaper. If a fact-checker contradicts your political team, you dismiss the fact-checker. Eventually, evidence becomes irrelevant.

What matters is who said it. That’s a dangerous place for a democracy to live. Because democracy depends upon citizens being able to disagree about what should happen while maintaining some agreement about what actually happened.

Without that foundation, political debate becomes little more than competing realities.

The Lies We Tell. The Truths We Don’t.

The history of Trump’s two presidencies isn’t simply a catalog of inaccurate statements. It is a case study in what happens when political communication becomes detached from the obligation to tell the public what is true. The Washington Post’s tally of Trump’s first term—30,573 false or misleading claims—is almost impossible to comprehend. But the number isn’t the most important part. The most important part is what happened after the fact-checks.

The claims were corrected. Then repeated. Corrected again. Repeated again. And again. Eventually, the correction itself became just another piece of partisan ammunition. That is the real danger.

A democracy can survive a politician who lies. It can survive a press secretary who spins. It can survive a misleading campaign advertisement. What becomes much harder to survive is a political culture in which truth is treated as optional, and accountability is treated as partisan warfare.

The White House podium was supposed to be where Americans got answers. Increasingly, it has become where Americans are asked to choose which version of reality they prefer. And perhaps that’s the biggest lie of all: That facts are something we vote on. They aren’t. The truth doesn’t need a political party. It doesn’t need a campaign slogan. It doesn’t need a podium. It simply needs to be true.