Trump Uses Lies to Lay the Groundwork for Radical Change

The United States sent $50 million in condoms to Hamas. Diversity programs caused a plane crash. China controls the Panama Canal. Ukraine started the war with Russia.

Except, no. None of that is true. Not that it stops President Trump. In the first month since he returned to power, he has demonstrated once again a brazen willingness to advance distortions, conspiracy theories and outright lies to justify major policy decisions.

Mr. Trump has long been unfettered by truth when it comes to boasting about his record and tearing down his enemies. But what were dubbed “alternative facts” in his first term have quickly become a whole alternative reality in his second to lay the groundwork for radical change as he moves to aggressively reshape America and the world.

If the U.S. Agency for International Development is stupid enough to send prophylactics to a Palestinian terrorist group in Gaza, he claims, then it deserves to be dismantled. If recruiting people other than white men to work in the airline sector compromises safety, such programs should be eliminated. If China controls the strategic passage through the continent, the United States should take it back. If Ukraine is the aggressor, it should make concessions to Moscow.

“One of the biggest presidential powers that Trump has deployed is the ability to shape his own narrative,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a Princeton history professor and editor of a book of essays about Mr. Trump’s first term. “We have seen repeatedly how President Trump creates his own reality to legitimate his actions and simultaneously discredit warnings about his decisions.”

Taking his real-estate hucksterism and reality-show storytelling into politics, Mr. Trump has for years succeeded in selling his version of events. The world according to Mr. Trump is one where he is a master of every challenge and any failure is someone else’s fault.

He claimed to have built the greatest economy in history during his first term so many times that even some of his critics came to accept that it was better than it really was. He dismissed intelligence reports that Russia intervened in the 2016 elections on his behalf so often that many supporters accepted his denial.

Most significantly, Mr. Trump has waged a four-year campaign to persuade Americans that he did not lose the 2020 election when in fact he did, making one false assertion of widespread fraud after another that would all be debunked yet still leave most Republicans convinced it was stolen, according to polls.

At the same time, he has recast the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by supporters trying to stop the transfer of power from a “heinous attack,” as he originally termed it, to a “day of love,” as he now calls it. This revised interpretation helped him rationalize pardoning nearly 1,600 people who were charged, including many who had beaten police officers.

“Trump is a highly skilled narrator and propagandist,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present” and a historian at New York University who specializes in fascism and authoritarianism. “Actually he is one of the most skilled propagandists in history.”

Dr. Ben-Ghiat said what made Mr. Trump’s “easily refutable lie” about the 2020 election so remarkable was that he was “working not in a one-party state or authoritarian context with a controlled media, but in a totally open society with a free press.”

But she and other scholars said some of Mr. Trump’s themes resemble those seen in authoritarian states. “The kind of propaganda and disinformation that we see now is not particularly new and not dependent on the internet,” said Benjamin Carter Hett, a historian of World War II at Hunter College. “Exactly the same kind of thing happened in the very diverse and lively German press of the 1920s and 1930s.”

Mr. Trump’s aides have long recognized his penchant for prevarication and either adjusted or eventually broke with him. John F. Kelly, his longest-serving White House chief of staff in his first term, has said that Mr. Trump would tell his press aides to publicly repeat something that he had just made up. When Mr. Kelly would object, saying, “but that’s not true,” Mr. Trump would say, “but it sounds good.”

Stephanie Grisham, who served as a White House press secretary in the first term, once recalled that Mr. Trump would tell aides that “as long as you keep repeating something, it doesn’t matter what you say.” And that trickled down to the staff. “Casual dishonesty filtered through the White House as though it were in the air-conditioning system,” she wrote in her memoir.

Anthony Scaramucci, a former Trump ally who served briefly as his White House communications director, said on Friday that Mr. Trump believes dishonesty works. Mr. Trump, he said, is at “50 years of distorting things and telling lies and he is at 50 years of getting away with it, so why wouldn’t he make the lies bigger and more impactful in this last stretch?”

The exaggerations and falsehoods serve a strategic purpose. While Mr. Trump won a clean victory in November, including in the popular vote, which he lost in 2016, he did not win a majority and his 1.5-percentage-point margin was one of the lowest since the 19th century. But he regularly says that he won a “landslide victory,” which serves not just to stroke his ego but to assert an expansive popular mandate for his agenda.

Mr. Trump, who repeatedly disparaged media fact-checking during last year’s campaign, does not back off after misleading statements and lies are exposed. Instead, he tends to double down, repeating them even after it’s been reported that they are not true.

After reporters determined that the $50 million for condoms story was untrue, Mr. Trump not only repeated it, he increased the supposed total to $100 million. Nor did he back down after falsely claiming that U.S.A.I.D. had provided grants to media organizations as “a ‘payoff’ for creating good stories about the Democrats,” even after learning the money was simply for subscriptions.

Likewise, Mr. Trump made his claim about diversity programs and air safety the day after the midair collision of a passenger jet and Army helicopter in Washington without an ounce of proof, nor did he ever follow up with any. And while a Hong Kong company operates two of five ports adjacent to the Panama Canal, he continues to say the passage is controlled by China when in fact Panama operates it.

And to support his effort to rescind the constitutional right to birthright citizenship, Mr. Trump keeps saying that the United States is “the only country in the world that does this,” even though it has been repeatedly reported that in fact more than 30 countries do.

“Opponents end up arguing about his narratives regardless of how grounded they are in fact,” said Dr. Zelizer. “This has put President Trump in a perpetual position of advantage since he decides the terms of debate rather than anyone seeking to stop him.”

In Mr. Trump’s facts-are-fungible world, conspiracy theories at times are given as much weight as tangible evidence and those who traffic in them are granted access that no other president would give. Just this past week, he talked about going to Fort Knox to see if the nation’s gold really is there, indulging a fringe suspicion that it is somehow missing.

Invited to accompany Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to Europe was Jack Posobiec, a far-right influencer who promoted the lie that Democrats were running a pedophile ring out of a Washington pizza parlor, a lie that inspired an armed man to burst in and open fire to save the supposed victims. Mr. Posobiec ended up not going but later accompanied Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to Ukraine.

Mr. Trump’s blame-the-victim revisionism over Ukraine in recent days has been among the most striking efforts to translate his alternative reality into policy. Over the course of several recent days, he said that Ukraine “started” the war with Russia in 2022 and called the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a “dictator without elections,” while absolving President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, an actual dictator who had invaded his neighbor. He went even further on Friday, saying, “It’s not Russia’s fault.”

By undercutting public sympathy for Ukraine, Mr. Trump may make it easier for him to strike a peace agreement with Mr. Putin giving Russia much of what it wants even over any objections by Mr. Zelensky or European leaders. Since Mr. Zelensky is a dictator responsible for the war, this reasoning goes, he deserves less consideration.

One of Mr. Trump’s claims about Ukraine offers a case study in his mythmaking. He said that the United States has provided $350 billion in aid to Ukraine, three times as much as Europe, but that much of the money is “missing” and that Mr. Zelensky “admits that half of the money we sent him is missing.”

In fact, the United States has allocated about a third of what Mr. Trump claimed, even less than Europe, and none of it is known to be missing.

The dollar figures cited for U.S. aid to Ukraine can vary depending on how government officials present them, what time period they cover and whether they include humanitarian and economic assistance.

How did Mr. Trump arrive at his claim? The White House did not respond to a request for elaboration. But it appears that Mr. Trump was referring to a recent interview with Mr. Zelensky that the president or his staff either misunderstood or distorted.

In the interview, Mr. Zelensky was asked by The Associated Press about exaggerated numbers and he corrected them. “When it’s said that Ukraine received $200 billion to support the army during the war, that’s not true,” Mr. Zelensky said according to a translation by Ukrainska Pravda, a Ukrainian news outlet. “I don’t know where all that money went.”

Mr. Zelensky was not saying that there was $200 billion and that he did not know where all of it went. He was saying there never was $200 billion in the first place. Even Mr. Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, has indicated no concern over missing money, saying that “we have a pretty good accounting of where it’s going.” Indeed, the vast bulk of U.S. aid approved for Ukraine has been in the form of weapons, not cash.

But that does not comport with the official line at the White House. Once Mr. Trump makes an assertion, those who work for him — and want to keep working for him — are compelled to tailor their own versions of reality to match his. Even if it requires them to abandon previous understandings of the facts.

So there was Michael Waltz, the former Republican congressman from Florida now serving as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, pressed last week to reconcile his past comments about who was responsible for the war in Ukraine with his boss’s current position.

A reporter read aloud from an opinion column that Mr. Waltz had written in 2023 stating that “Putin is to blame, certainly, like Al Qaeda was to blame for 9/11.” Mr. Waltz was asked if he still believed that or whether he now shared Mr. Trump’s assessment that Ukraine had started the war.

“Well,” Mr. Waltz said carefully, “it shouldn’t surprise you that I share the president’s assessment on all kinds of issues. What I wrote as a member of Congress was as a former member of Congress.”

And so, Mr. Waltz’s actual reality gave way to Mr. Trump’s alternative version.