On this website, we walk through five examples of times Donald Trump and his ride or die militia have tried to gaslight this country: The Election Fraud Lie; Always Find a Boogeyman; Tinfoil Hats to Red Hats: The Conspiracy Theory Trap; The Russian “Hoax”; and Total Distortion of Economic Accomplishments.

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We wrote most of these before Donald Trump’s second inauguration and, in our hearts, really hoped this time around might be different. In fact, we clung to that hope as long as we could. But it’s not different. It’s way worse.

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As we researched government data after the inauguration, it began to disappear… information we were using from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics one day was literally gone the next. Past and present statistics about crime, economy, climate, health… just gone. The Trump/Vance administration then started burying facts that contradicted their false narratives, cancelling annual reports like the Household Food Security report – which measures food insecurity across states and demographic groups and, in 2024, found around 18 million U.S. households were food insecure at some time during 2023, a million more than the year before – and Global Trends, a report that U.S. intelligence officials publish every four years to forecast the potential challenges the United States may face in the coming decades. Reports in the past have predicted events that eventually happened, including new immigration patterns and the risk of a global pandemic.

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If they can’t delete or suppress evidence and/or facts they find inconvenient – or fire the messengers, like they did with at least seventeen inspectors general, dozens of federal prosecutors, and Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics who was fired for daring to release monthly jobs data that showed weak hiring – they just lie.

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Like the time Elon Musk stood in the Oval Office and told reporters that after a “cursory examination of Social Security, we’ve got people in there that are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone who is 150?” – insinuating that 150-year-olds are claiming Social Security benefits. … a claim that actual tech geniuses quickly dismissed as probably a data error in the agency’s ancient COBOL coding language. Of course, Elon could have put his mind at ease much earlier if he had calmed down long enough to read a July 2023 report from the Social Security Inspector General that found 98 percent of people in the database who are 100 years old or older are not receiving benefits and “have not had earnings reported to SSA in the past 50 years.”

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Or the time the White House press secretary announced, from the podium, that the administration had uncovered a USAID plan to spend $50 million to give condoms to Hamas (the money was actually for operating two field hospitals in Gaza that provided surgical care and emergency maternal and newborn care), or the time they said USAID had given the media company Politico $8 million (the number was actually $44,000, which was paid for subscriptions). Or the time the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, told members of Congress that the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) had spent $9.3 million “to advise Russian doctors on how to perform abortions and gender analysis.” …a bald-faced lie.

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Or the time Elon posted on X that “Reuters was paid millions of dollars by the US government for ‘large scale social deception. They’re a total scam. Just wow.” Never mind that the contract in question was between the Defense Department and Thomson Reuters Special Services, not the news division; was a contract to defend against cyberattacks; and was signed during Donald Trump’s first term. We guess Donald didn’t know this when he used the contract as evidence of corrupt relationships between the “radical left” media and the “deep state,” posting “GIVE BACK THE MONEY, NOW!”

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In President Trump’s 100-minute-long address to Congress on March 4, 2025, he misled, lied about, or flat made-up things about the size of his popular vote; the number of people who illegally cross the border and that “virtually all of them” are “murderers, drug dealers, gang members, and people from mental institutions and insane asylums;” that the Paris Climate Accord was costing us “trillions” of dollars;” that we spent $45 million for diversity, equity and inclusion scholarships in Burma; that we spent $20 million for the Arab Sesame Street in the Middle East; that hundreds of thousands of federal workers weren’t showing up to work; the number of people who died building the Panama Canal; his tax cuts resulting in the “most successful economy in the history of our country, a lie that’s a lie two ways; and the amount of money we have given Ukraine. Plus, many more things.

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It didn’t stop there. In the first eight months of his second term alone, he claimed: there was no inflation (there is); that he would drive drug prices down by 1,500 percent (prices can’t drop by more than 100 percent); that the price of gasoline had fallen to $1.99 a gallon in five states (at a time when it was over $3 a gallon in every state); that over 300,000 Americans die each year of drug overdoses (that’s triple the number); that America is the only country in the world that uses mail-in voting (dozens of countries do); that if his Big Beautiful Bill didn’t pass we would all get a 68 percent tax increase (it was more like 7.5 percent); that the United States has given Ukraine “$350 billion” in wartime aid (it was well less than half that number); and that Los Angeles now “had water” because he “turned the valve” to send it to them (which makes no sense at all). Perhaps the biggest whopper was that, simply because he was the president, businesses had invested $16 trillion in the United States since he returned to office – even though the entire U.S. economy is worth less than $30 trillion.

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Like all masterful liars, Donald started laying the groundwork for his deceit early. Even before his 2016 presidential campaign officially began, he railed against the “Deep State” and started calling the MSM (a.k.a. “mainstream media”) “fake news” and “enemy of the people.” He repeated this over and over and over and over – incessantly – which is another mind trick used by skillful liars. As a result, if we happen to mention to hardcore Trump supporters that The Washington Post reported their hero made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his first term as president – which they do, often accompanied by video evidence of him telling said falsehood – they will likely dismiss it out of hand because The Washington Post is obviously The Devil. It’s absolute genius.

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So, by the time he needed to tell a really big lie – like when he wanted to save face after he lawfully lost the 2020 presidential election – many of his supporters had lost all trust in the media, as well as the people who work in every level of government and the agencies and institutions they work for. Again, genius.

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​It was Machiavelli who said that “one who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.” But it was Voltaire who made the terrifying but brilliant observation: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

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As a civil society, we must get back to a place where we can, at a minimum, agree on a basic set of facts. Whatever we decide to do about that set of facts is an entirely different issue, but we must start from a place of truth. And make no mistake, there actually is still such a thing!

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This was way easier back in the day, when families would sit together each night and watch Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley and Edward R. Murrow speak the truth, not as they individually viewed it, but as the way it actually was. People across the United States all heard the same facts. We're not naïve enough to believe we will ever get back to that exact place, but there are many ways we can recapture its essence.​​