In a speech last week to the National Guard Association of the United States, former President Donald Trump claimed that he was the president who “created” the Veterans Choice health care program, and got it “passed in Congress,” after others had wanted to do so “for 57 years.”
In reality, President Barack Obama was the president who signed the program into law in 2014. The law Trump signed in 2018, the VA MISSION Act, expanded the Veterans Choice program but didn’t create it.
I could fact-check this Trump lie half-asleep – because he’s been telling it for more than six years.
Trump’s lying is most exceptional in its relentlessness, a never-ending avalanche of wrongness that can bury even the most devoted fact-checkers. But it’s also notable for its repetitiveness. He has found his hits, and he’ll keep playing them no matter how many times they are debunked.
As Trump enters the post-Labor Day sprint of his 2024 campaign for the presidency, his commentary is filled with many of the same false claims he made as president from 2017 to 2021. He’s even repeating some of the false claims he used during his 2016 presidential campaign.
As a fact-check reporter for CNN, I watch or read the transcript of every public appearance by Trump and his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. While Harris’ campaign remarks to date have been heavy on thematic rhetoric and light on assertions of fact, with a smattering of false or misleading claims, Trump’s 2024 interviews and speeches are littered with old falsehoods I’ve come to call “the repeats” – assertions I have fact-checked as false over and over for years.
For example, Trump falsely claimed on a podcast last week that people are saying global warming will cause the oceans to rise just “an eighth of an inch in 355 years.” He was saying near-identical nonsense in 2019. (Sea levels are already rising more than an eighth of an inch per year.)
Trump falsely claimed at a rally last month that his tariffs on imported Chinese goods are paid by China, not Americans, and that no previous president had generated even “10 cents” from tariffs on Chinese goods. He was saying the same in 2018. (The tariff payments are made by US importers, not Chinese exporters, and the US government was already generating billions per year from such tariffs before Trump took office.)
Trump falsely claimed in a speech in mid-August that he had warned the US not to invade Iraq. That claim was a key part of his campaign pitch in 2015 and 2016. (Trump expressed tentative support for the 2003 invasion about six months before it occurred, did not express a firm opinion on an invasion about two months before it occurred, and only came out as an opponent of the war post-invasion.)
Trump’s false claims in the podcast interview last week that some NATO members were “delinquent” and “owed … huge amounts of money” before he took office were also staples of his 2016 run. (NATO members didn’t owe anybody money even if they were not meeting the alliance’s voluntary 2%-of-GDP guideline for their own defense spending.)
Trump’s regular false claims of a “rigged” 2020 election echo his language from both his 2016 campaign and 2020 campaign. (The claims were baseless then and are baseless now.)
And less importantly, when Trump declared in June, July and again on Thursday that he had been named “Man of the Year” in Michigan long before he entered politics, it was the third straight presidential election he had told this silly lie he debuted in 2016. (There is no evidence the award even exists, let alone that Trump, who has never lived in Michigan, received it.)
How the repetition works for Trump – and doesn’t
Nobody really knows how much of Trump’s deployment of old lies is strategic and how much is mere force of habit. Regardless, his persistence produces a clear benefit for him.
News outlets tend to focus on new material. While some outlets may be inclined to fact-check a false Trump claim the first, second, third or even 10th time he utters it, they are far less likely to devote precious resources to a claim on the 100th or 150th utterance – especially because he is constantly mixing in dozens of new lies that require time and resources to address. And so, by virtue of shameless perseverance, Trump often manages to outlast most of the media’s willingness to correct any particular falsehood, eventually getting that claim into news coverage and social media clips nearly uncorrected.
That’s not to say his lying is an unmitigated victory.
Numerous polls have found for years that a clear majority of voters do not see Trump as honest; from talking to Americans around the country since 2015, I know there are a lot of people who distrust almost anything he says. I have no doubt that his insistence on continuing to say dozens of things people have already learned are false is part of the reason why.
Still, I try to match Trump’s tirelessness in lying with my own tirelessness in challenging the lies. The separation of fact from fiction is central to journalists’ role in the democratic process, and there are always citizens out there who are hearing even the stalest of deceptions for the first time.
So as long as Trump or any other major political figure keeps reviving their past nonsense, we should keep debunking that nonsense. Even if we already did it eight years ago.
