President Joe Biden's performance in his June 27 debate with Donald Trump was so bad that it ultimately resulted in his withdrawal from the election. It was also so bad that it distracted attention from his opponent's flagrant prevarications. But Trump's longstanding tendency to make stuff up, to the point that you have to discount almost anything he says by at least 90 percent, should not be dismissed as a personal quirk or standard political practice.
While politicians commonly bend the truth, Trump routinely bends it to the breaking point, saying things that are not accurate by any stretch of the imagination. Reason's Nick Gillespie, in a piece arguing that Trump's speech at the Republican National Convention was politically canny, notes in passing "his inability to say two true statements consecutively." Americans have become so inured to Trump's habitual hyperbole that it may not make a difference in this election. But it really should, because it reflects not just an utter disregard for the facts but an arrogant assumption that voters don't care whether the nation's highest elected official even aspires to tell the truth.
During the debate, Trump alluded to his never-substantiated claim that the 2020 election was rigged, saying "the fraud and everything else was ridiculous." But even apart from his stolen-election fantasy, he said a bunch of things that were demonstrably false.
"We had the greatest economy in the history of our country," Trump declared at the very beginning of the debate. "We had never done so well."
Gross domestic product growth during Trump's four years in office averaged 2.3 percent. Even during the three pre-pandemic years, the average was a modest 2.5 percent. That's a bit higher than annual GDP growth under Barack Obama and George W. Bush, and it's significantly higher than the average rate under George H.W. Bush. But it is lower than the growth seen during the Clinton, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, and Eisenhower administrations.
"I gave you the largest tax cut in history," Trump also claimed. That is also inconsistent with the historical record.
According to the Tax Foundation, "the five largest tax reductions since 1940 are the Revenue Acts of 1945, 1948, and 1964; the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981; and the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012." Those cuts "reduced revenue by between 1.6 percent and 2.89 percent of GDP, on average." By comparison, the reduction achieved by the Trump-backed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 amounted to 0.7 percent of GDP, placing it ninth on the Tax Foundation's list, a slot shared by two previous pieces of legislation.
"I also gave you the largest regulation cut in history," Trump averred. That claim likewise does not withstand scrutiny.
"Under my administration," Trump said at a July 2020 press conference, "we have removed nearly 25,000 pages of job-destroying regulations—more than any other president by far in the history of our country." According to a November 2020 report from the Penn Program on Regulation, that is "simply false."
At the end of 2019, the report notes, the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) ran to 185,984 pages—"actually a somewhat greater number of pages, not fewer, than when President Trump took office." While the number of CFR pages dipped by 0.5 percent from 2017 to 2018, "this tiny decrease was offset by comparably sized increases from 2016 to 2017 and then again from 2018 to 2019." And even that one-year drop was small compared to the 10 percent decreases seen in 1954, 1957, and 1964; the 5.3 percent reduction in 1985; and the 4.4 percent decline in 1996. In short, "President Trump's record does not even come close to previous years showing the largest drops."
Trump has variously claimed that his administration eliminated seven, "nearly eight", and 22 regulations for each one it issued. Taking the Trump administration's own classifications at face value, the Penn Program found, the ratio was more like 5 to 1. But even that calculation "overstates the Trump Administration's deregulatory accomplishments," the report says. "In terms of the significant actions that have substantial impacts on the lives of Americans, the number of deregulatory actions is at best very close to the number of regulatory actions and possibly significantly below that number."
When it comes to "the number of new rules issued," the report's authors concede, the Trump administration was less active than the Obama administration. During its first three years, the Trump administration issued "an annual average of 3,204 final rules," a 12 percent decrease from the first three years of the Obama administration, which "was itself a 12 percent decrease [from] the first three years of the George W. Bush Administration." Furthermore, Trump "issued 107 economically significant rules
during his first three years," while "the average for the first three years of the prior five
presidencies was 118 such rules." That difference, while a far cry from Trump's promise that he would eliminate 70 percent of federal regulations, is significant.
As usual, however, Trump cannot resist gilding the lily. He has claimed that he "launched the most dramatic regulatory relief campaign in American history by far" and asserted that his administration "eliminated more regulations in our first year than any administration has ever eliminated." As the Penn Program report notes, "little support exists" for such claims, since the Trump administration did not cut "the overall number of pages" in the CFR and "completed far more regulatory actions than deregulatory ones once the full data are examined." The report adds that "nothing the Trump Administration has done compares to the deregulation of the airlines, rail, and truck transportation that was executed by the Carter Administration in the late 1970s."
Trump is on firmer ground in claiming credit for appointing the Supreme Court justices who clinched a majority in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade. But even here, he rewrites history by wishing away the controversy surrounding that accomplishment. After Roe, Trump claimed during the debate, "everybody, without exception," thought abortion policy should be turned "back to the states." According to Trump, that included "every legal scholar throughout the world." He thus pretended that half a century of debate about the merits of Roe, which included "legal scholar[s]" on both sides, never happened.
Trump's criticism of Biden was also absurdly hyperbolic. "We had the safest border in history," he said. "Now we have the worst border in history….Because of his ridiculous, insane, and very stupid policies, people are coming in and they're killing our citizens at a level that we've never seen."
As Reason's Fiona Harrigan notes, there is little evidence to support Trump's claim of an unprecedented migrant crime wave. "Crime is actually down in the cities that received the most migrants as a result of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's busing operations," she writes. "The partial crime data that exist for this year show consistent declines in major crimes in major cities," Cato Institute immigration expert David Bier told Harrigan. He added that "the most significant crime spike in recent years occurred in 2020—when illegal immigration was historically low until the end of the year."
So it went with other aspects of Biden's record. The sloppy withdrawal from Afghanistan was not just "a horrible embarrassment"; it was "the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country." Biden is not just a bad president; he is "the worst president…in the history of the country"—"the worst in history by far."
While these judgments are admittedly subjective, there is a lot of competition on both scores. Historians probably would place slavery, segregation, genocidal campaigns against Native Americans, the detention of Japanese Americans during World War II, the torching of the White House during the War of 1812, or the Vietnam War higher on the scale of national embarrassments than the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which at least put a stop to a disastrous intervention that (even according to Trump) should have ended much sooner. And leaving aside the question of where exactly Biden should rank on the list of worst presidents, we probably should leave some room for the likes of James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and (for libertarians especially) Woodrow Wilson.
According to several possibly premature and ideologically tinged assessments by historians and political scientists, Trump himself belongs at or near the bottom of presidential rankings. But according to unspecified "polling," Trump said, "they rate me one of the best."
As has always been the case with Trump, it is hard to say whether he actually believes the things he says. He is either reflexively dishonest, self-deceiving, or a little of both. None of these characterizations bodes well for a second Trump term.
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