Julia Hernandez
(CNN) — In a speech to the National Guard Association last week, former President Donald Trump claimed that he was the president who “created” the Veterans Choice health care program and got it “passed through Congress” after others had wanted to do so “for 57 years.”
In fact, it was President Barack Obama who signed the program into law in 2014. The law Trump signed in 2018, the Va Mission Act, expanded the Veterans Choice program but did not create it.
I could fact-check this Trump lie while half asleep, because he’s been telling it for over six years.
ANALYSIS | Trump’s aggressive new strategy to stop Harris’ momentum
Trump’s lies are exceptional for their relentlessness, an endless avalanche of errors that can bury even the most devoted fact-checkers. But they are also remarkable for their repetitiveness. He has found his successes, and he will keep repeating them no matter how many times they are disproven.
As Trump enters the post-Labor Day rush 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.
Trump continues to deploy his old favorites
As a fact-checking 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’s campaign remarks to date have been heavy on thematic rhetoric and light on factual assertions, with a handful of false or misleading claims, Trump’s 2024 interviews and speeches are filled with old falsehoods that I’ve come to call “the rehashes” — claims I’ve fact-checked as false again and again for years.
For example, Trump falsely claimed on a podcast last week that people say global warming will cause oceans to rise only “0.3 cm in 355 years.” He said nearly identical nonsense in 2019. (Sea levels are already rising more than 0.3 cm per year.)
Trump falsely said 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 said the same thing in 2018. (Tariff payments are made by American importers, not Chinese exporters, and the U.S. government was already making billions a year from such tariffs before Trump took office.)
ANALYSIS | Harris and Trump compete for the center
Trump falsely claimed in a mid-August speech that he had warned the United States not to invade Iraq. That claim was a key part of his campaign speech in 2015 and 2016. (Trump expressed tentative support for the 2003 invasion about six months before it happened, expressed no strong view on an invasion about two months before it happened, and only came out as opposed to war after the invasion.)
Trump’s false claims in last week’s podcast interview that some NATO members were “delinquent” and “owed … huge amounts of money” before he took office were also staples of his 2016 campaign. (NATO members didn’t owe anyone money even if they weren’t meeting the alliance’s voluntary guideline of 2 percent of GDP for their own defense spending.)
Trump says he had “every right to interfere in the presidential election”
Trump’s regular false claims about a “rigged” 2020 election echo his language from both his 2016 and 2020 campaigns. (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 Michigan’s “Man of the Year” long before he entered politics, it was the third consecutive presidential election in which he told this foolish lie, which he first enunciated in 2016. (There is no evidence that the award even exists, much less that Trump, who has never lived in Michigan, ever received it.)
How repetition works for Trump, and doesn’t work at the same time
No one knows for sure how much of Trump’s deployment of old lies is strategic and how much is mere force of habit. In any case, his persistence brings him a clear benefit.
The media tends to focus on new material. While some outlets may be inclined to fact-check a false Trump claim the first, second, third, or even tenth time he utters it, they are far less likely to devote valuable resources to a claim on the 100th or 150th utterance, especially since he is constantly mixing in dozens of new lies that require time and resources to address. And so, by virtue of his sheer persistence, Trump often manages to outlast most media outlets’ willingness to correct a particular falsehood, eventually getting that claim to appear in the news and on social media largely uncorrected.
That doesn’t mean that his lies are an absolute victory.
Trump’s latest doubts about reproductive health reveal he hasn’t yet found an answer to the problem he himself created
Numerous polls have been showing for years that a clear majority of voters do not view Trump as honest; from talking to Americans across the country since 2015, I know that there are many people who distrust almost everything he says. I have no doubt that his insistence on continuing to say dozens of things that people have already learned are false is part of the reason.
Still, I try to match Trump’s relentlessness in lying with my own relentlessness in rebutting lies. Separating fact from fiction is central to the role of journalists in the democratic process, and there are always citizens who hear even the most rancid deceptions for the first time.
So as long as Trump or any other major political figure keeps reliving the nonsense of the past, we must continue to debunk that nonsense. Even if we did so eight years ago.
