This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
You wouldn't know it anymore, but Donald Trump's grandparents and mother were immigrants, as were two of his wives. And imagine this: if they all had arrived here early in 2025, just as their son or grandson was reentering the Oval Office (yes, stretch your brain a little on that one), they might find themselves collected by nothing less than members of the U.S. military and deported. After all, he's sworn that, on the first day of his second term in office, he'll declare a "national emergency" and round up what are, for him, the usual suspects. Worse yet (or, of course, if you're The Donald, best yet), he is indeed reportedly planning to use -- yes, the U.S. military! -- to do so! Whether that military would be any more successful in following a president's orders for mayhem in this country than they were in this century in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere remains, of course, an open question. One Pentagon official, as Nick Turse recently reported, called the idea "absolutely insane."
And Trump has said more than once that he plans to deport no fewer than 15 to 20 million people (no matter, of course, that there are estimated to be fewer than 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States right now). Of course, we're talking about the same man who claimed that Haitian immigrants were eating people's pets in Springfield, Ohio, and that Venezuelan gangs were running wild in Aurora, Colorado. As he promised on the campaign trail this fall, "We will have the largest deportation in the history of our country. And we'll start with Springfield and Aurora." (I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn that Haitian immigrant families are now fleeing Springfield "in droves" even though they may actually have "legal status" here.)
Of course, if you don't mind my changing the subject, this is the same man who claimed that, when it came to the dangers of climate change, "the ocean will rise -- maybe, it may go down, also -- but it may rise one-eighth of an inch in the next 497 years, they say." This is the man, the very one who will once again be "our" president, who would, in essence, say just about anything about just about anything, as TomDispatch regular Arnold Isaacs makes all too vividly clear today, and count on this, whatever other wild positions he creates, there won't be a fact-checker in sight in the White House. Tom
Fact-Checker Alert
Countering Trump's Falsehoods Is More Urgent Than Ever
During this year's presidential election campaign, I was puzzled and increasingly troubled that the issue of truth-telling -- and the spectacular lack of it from one candidate -- wasn't getting the sort of focus or emphasis in the news coverage it should have received. We heard or read about Donald Trump's specific false statements just about every day (because they happened just about every day). But we didn't often hear about the deeper questions those falsehoods raised and continue to raise: What will it mean to have a president of the United States who has no regard for the truth and often no idea what it is? What will it do to public life if a president's words can't be trusted, no matter what he's talking about? What are the possible consequences if a president consistently ignores or distorts proven facts, and how much will those distortions shape his policy decisions and actions?
For obvious reasons those questions became more significant, not less, with Trump's victory. His habitual disregard for the truth isn't just an old story from a past presidency, but today's and tomorrow's news for the next four years. So, journalists, opinion-makers, and anyone else whose voice reaches the public need to keep raising the issue in the weeks leading up to Trump's second inauguration and after he takes office. That means not just calling out individual falsehoods but connecting the dots, reminding us of his overall record and what it should tell us about the next phase of American public life. Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute and a co-founder of the fact-checking website PolitiFact, got it right in a fundraising email two days after the election when he reminded supporters that "facts are the foundation of our reality." Checking facts, he went on, "is time-consuming but essential" There is no off switch on the dial of misinformation."
For the most part, we have no way of knowing which of Trump's false statements are conscious lies -- when he's saying something he knows isn't true -- and when he believes his own words because they fit into the made-up world he's concocted in the insulated bubble of his mind. But that distinction hardly matters when it comes to what kind of president he'll be. A chronic liar or chronically delusional, either one is a dangerous person to have in the White House for the next four years. That makes it essential to keep a spotlight not just on specific factual issues as they crop up in the news, but on the broader credibility question as well, tracking the misinformation Trump and his crew will almost certainly spew out and, where possible, countering its influence on policy decisions and official actions.
On Immigration, A Stunning Record of Untruths
Perhaps the most immediate and urgent need for that kind of fact-checking will be on immigration policy, where Donald Trump has consistently misrepresented essential facts for many years. The sheer volume of those falsehoods is breathtaking. A recent report from the Marshall Project, a nonprofit investigative news site, documented 12,000 false statements of his on that issue alone -- no, that's not a misprint, twelve thousand untrue statements! -- during his years in the public arena. I searched but found no indication that Trump has ever backed down from any of them or acknowledged that anything he said on the subject was untrue. Corroborating that impression, Anna Flagg, one of the coauthors of the Marshall Project paper, wrote in response to an email inquiry that she is "personally not aware of Trump correcting any of these statements."
Far from correcting such falsehoods, he has often repeated them even after they were thoroughly and conclusively debunked. One of many examples was his claim in a late September blog post that "13,000 convicted murderers entered our Country during [Kamala Harris's] three and a half year period as Border Czar -- Also currently in our Country because of her are 15,811 migrants convicted of rape and sexual assault." Journalists quickly established that those numbers, listed on a chart prepared by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), were, in fact, a count of people who had entered the country over a more than 40-year time span, including Donald Trump's four years as president. That airtight refutation didn't stop him from repeating the same false allegation a month later, when he declared in an interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan that "other countries are allowed to empty their prisons into our country with murderers, we had 13,099 murderers dropped in our country over the last three years."
Nor were those murderers able to "freely and openly roam our Country," as Trump claimed in yet another post. The list of convicted murderers, a DHS spokesperson told CNN, included "many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners." (Confusingly, the DHS chart lists all 13,099 as "undetained," but that means only that they weren't in the custody of the U.S. immigration agency, not that they weren't in state or federal prisons.)
Another example came during Trump's September 10th debate with Kamala Harris, when, speaking about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, he alleged that "in Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating -- they're eating the pets of the people that live there" -- a story police and local officials had already declared to be untrue. Trump also regularly exaggerates the number of Haitians actually in Springfield, as when he told listeners to the Rogan podcast that "32,000 migrants that don't speak the language" had been "dropped" there. The actual estimate is 10,000-12,000.
Reminding us of the facts when it comes to those and numerous other distortions is crucially important now that Trump will again be in a position not just to bluster about immigration but to execute policies that will affect huge numbers of men, women, and children. Starting now, fact-checkers should do everything they can to make Americans aware of the actual facts -- such as the strong likelihood that the mass deportations he's vowed to launch "on day one" of his presidency will upend the lives of many people who are not illegal immigrants but are in the U.S. legally (a category that includes almost all of the Haitians in Springfield that Trump wants sent "back to their country").
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