How many times did Trump lie in the debate?

According to Washington Post fact checker, “dozens”.

Thank you for asking this. It’s a very valid question.

All of them.

According to one fact checker I saw online, about 8 lies for Biden and 30+ for Trump. I’ll try to find the link.

Post Birth Abortion is another lie that 45 tells. He’s got his base believing that when the baby is born, the doctors kill it & shove it back in to make it appear to be a still birth In other words, the abortion occurs AFTER a live baby is born. That is poppycock!!!

I didn’t even attempt to keep up with the number of lies told by 45 because I can’t count that high. If his mouth opened, it’s safe to say that a lie followed!!!

Over 50, based on an article listing 50 of the lies, and comments from others saying that wasn’t all of them.

Another article estimated a lie rate of 97% for the things Trump said.

Trump doesn’t lie – you must have some concept of the truth in order to lie and I think Trump has no concept of the truth. Don’t look at his face and expect to see the truth. Trump is like a stopped clock that tells the truth from time to time but only by accident.

This link popped up for me:

https://www.fluther.com/206795/what-are-we-to-make-of-trump-boasting-about-telling-lies/

Interesting perspective from 2018, with various comments on his prospects for a second term.

It was a lot

I have a friend who was disgusted with CNN because they apparently didn’t do any fact checking.

I heard Trump lied over 30 times.

Post birth probably relates to the pro-lifers wanting or talking about laws that make a doctor try to save all fetuses that are born breathing. The way I understand it, part of the reason “partial birth abortions” kill the fetus before delivery is because once delivered alive it is no longer part of the woman. There are real medical and humane reasons to kill the fetus before.

The pro-lifers for years have been messaging that Democrats want to kill babies and states that moved for legislation to abort through the 9th month gave their message more validity. I think the problem is, abortion is being used synonymously with D&C and previously we separated the two. To be clear I’m disgusted how pro-life lies and twists abortion rights and that Trump picks up on their representation of abortion and uses it.

When I listened to the debate, I felt like most of what Trump said Republicans already believe.

I wondered if what he said about offering the National Guard to Pelosi before Jan 6 was true? I still want to research that. We all know he sat for hours doing nothing to help the Capitol during the attack, for some reason that wasn’t emphasized in the debate. Even so, that doesn’t answer the question of before, and all I’ve heard about on cable news political talk shows is on the day of Jan 6th. There might have been in depth reporting that did cover beforehand, I just am unaware of the answer.

I can’t even remember if they touched on tariffs in the debate, but did you know the tariff changes that Trump made Biden has kept in place? I saw Lawrence O’Donnell a couple of days ago talking about how tariff’s are passed onto the consumer, but failed to mention the consumer can choose not to buy the more expensive imported item.

I listened to Trump talk about the current wars in Ukraine and Gaza never would have started under him and he could end the wars. I thought to myself, people will want to believe this.

If someone doesn’t follow politics a lot, and isn’t part of a group that is afraid of the far right, and you don’t think the US could ever be Nazi Germany, and you are aware of the more extreme part of the political left that are socialists like Cuba (communists) not socialists like Sweden, Trump sounds ok.

I agree that immediately after the debate the political news shows flipped on Biden and practically ignored Trump’s lies. I think they were geared up to be hailing Biden, and they like to feel they are willing to disagree with the Democrats, and pride themself on truth, so all of that mixed together they dwelled on their honest opinion about Biden in the debate. I also think some talking heads try to manipulate politicians and the DNC and hope Biden gets replaced, so they push the narrative Biden didn’t do well.

About 40 years ago I started to realize people define lies differently. Liars like Trump tell people what they want to hear and then it’s supposedly not a lie. It is blatant lying to those of us who didn’t grow up that way,

There aren’t alternative facts, but there is editing, taking things out of context, twisting, and spinning.

Honestly, do we rag on Hitler for being a liar? No, he was a genocidal madman who turned a weak democracy into a totalitarian nightmare and ended up causing the deaths of millions before swallowing cyanide and a bullet to avoid justice, What the fuck is a lie?

Remembered another…Biden accused him of having sex with a porn star. Without missing a beat, he looked into the camera, pulled a Bill Clinton, & said I didn’t have sex with a porn star.

Hitler isn’t running for US President @Smashley.

^Thank you

I think @Smashley was saying Trump will aim to be a totalitarian dictator.

Well to be fair, at the time she was not a porn star, she was a whore.

I think @Smashley is saying what’s the big fuckin’ deal? So he told a lie!

I’m saying he’s a really really bad guy, as potentially dangerous as Hitler, with a greater downside. How is lying the thing we are talking about?

I mean, it’s a fine question and all that. I know I can be abrasive on this subject, but lying is just the tool of a monster, which he is. Asking about his lies presupposes some kind of humanity,

It really depends on the fact checker and how they spin things. You mentioned the post-birth abortion statement. That was deemed a lie by most left-wing fact checkers. Yet they conveniently forgot the debate in VA back in 2019. Here is a video of then Gov Northam on a radio show, taking and answering questions. The question that addresses the post-birth abortion starts at about 38:45 into the video. Here is a quote from what was said:

“Julie Carey: ... There was a very contentious committee hearing yesterday when Fairfax County Delegate Kathy Tran made her case for lifting restrictions on third-trimester abortions, as well as other restrictions now in place. And she was pressed by a Republican delegate about whether her bill would permit an abortion even as a woman is, essentially, dilating, ready to give birth. And she answered that it would permit an abortion at that stage of labor. Do you support her measure? And explain her answer.

Ralph Northam: You know, I wasn’t there, Julie, and I certainly can’t speak for Delegate Tran, but I would tell you—one, the first thing I would say is this is why decisions such as this should be made by [healthcare] providers, physicians, and the mothers and fathers that are involved. There are—you know when we talk about third-trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of, obviously, the mother, with the consent of the physicians, more than one physician by the way. And it’s done in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus that’s non-viable. So in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother. So I think this was really blown out of proportion…”

The governor said that in the case he described, the baby would be delivered, resuscitated if that is what the mother wanted, made comfortable, and then the mother would have the discussion with the doctor. The implication is that discussion would be whether or not to abort the baby, since that was the topic of the question. The governor was asked about this multiple times afterward by other news outlets but refused comment.

So there was a bill being presented by a radical lefty in VA to push abortion out as far as the mother wanted. It got push back in their state congress and never got passed as a bill. The governor understood the bill to be what he described. So is it a lie that Trump brings this up? Or is it just inconvenient and the lefty media wants to call it a lie?

I saw an AP article calling out the lies. They picked one where Trump made a comment about a relatively small number of people that entered the Capitol on J6, many of whom were ushered in by Capitol police. The AP said this was a lie stating that the Capitol police said this was false…that no police ushered protesters in. Yet we all saw the video of it happening. We saw the video of them escorting the QAnon Shaman around, even opening doors for him. So was it a lie? The AP called J6 “the deadliest assault on the seat of American power in over 200 years.” Yet only two people died that day. Both protesters. One died of apparent drug overdose and the other was an unarmed young lady that was gunned down by a cop. So their own claim is grossly exaggerated if not an out and out lie.

The AP also said Trump lied about having the lowest taxes and regulations ever on J6. This is an exaggeration, to be sure, but they say it was a lie since they went all the way back to 1913 and 1920 to point times when taxes and regulations were lower. They did admit that he slashed them both significantly, though.

The AP claimed Trump said “We had the greatest economy in history”. This is partially true. He said something similar twice in basically the same question. But their reason for calling it a lie was because of Covid. Yet Trump also mentioned that in his answer…that things were great before Covid and he ended up working on Covid instead of really fixing the economy. The AP conveniently forgot to address that. They took something partial out of context and called it a lie. Huh.

If you go back to look at all the “lies” the lefty media is claiming of Trump, and really challenge them, you find it is mainly spin. That isn’t to say he didn’t exaggerate or even possibly lie about things, but not to the extent they report. It is another example of the left-wing media covering for the Democrats.

”[Trump’s] entire performance was either lies or rambling non-sequiturs. He lied so incessantly throughout the evening that it took CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale almost three minutes, speaking quickly, to get through the list.

Trump said that some Democratic states allow people to execute babies after they’re born and that every legal scholar wanted Roe v. Wade overturned—both fantastical lies. He said that the deficit is at its highest level ever and that the U.S. trade deficit is at its highest ever: both of those things happened during his administration. He lied that there were no terrorist attacks during his presidency; there were many. He said that Biden wants to quadruple people’s taxes—this is “pure fiction,” according to Dale—and lied that his tax cuts paid for themselves; they have, in fact, added trillions of dollars to the national debt.

Dale went on: Trump lied that the U.S. has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe has when it’s the other way around, and he was off by close to $100 billion when he named the amount the U.S. has provided to Ukraine. He was off by millions when he talked about how many migrants have crossed the border under Biden, and falsely claimed that some of Biden’s policies—like funding historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and reducing the price of insulin to $35 a month—were his own accomplishments.

There is no point in going on, because virtually everything he said was a lie. As Jake Lahut of the Daily Beast recorded, he also was all over the map. “On January 6,” Trump said, “we had a great border.” To explain how he would combat opioid addiction, he veered off into talking points about immigration and said his administration “bought the best dog.” He boasted about acing a cognitive test and that he had just recently won two golf club tournaments without mentioning that they were at his own golf courses. “To do that, you have to be quite smart and you have to be able to hit the ball a long way,” he said. “I can do it.”

As Lahut recorded, Trump said this: “Clean water and air. We had it. We had the H2O best numbers ever, and we were using all forms of energy during my 4 years. Best environmental numbers ever, they gave me the statistic [sic.] before I walked on stage actually.”

Trump also directly accused Biden of his own failings and claimed Biden’s own strengths, saying, for example, that Biden, who has enacted the most sweeping legislation of any president since at least Lyndon Johnson, couldn’t get anything done while he, who accomplished only tax cuts, was more effective. He responded to the calling out of his own criminal convictions by saying that Biden “could be a convicted felon,” and falsely stating: “This man is a criminal.” And, repeatedly, Trump called America a “failing nation” and described it as a hellscape.”

- Heather Cox Richardson

What would have been nice is (or was) if Biden pushed back and when Trump lied, Biden could have pointed out the lies at the time. Unfortunately, Biden barely could get his talking points out in a coherent fashion, let alone actually debate.

@Zaku Thank you for making my point. Look at what you cited and then go back to the debate where these things were talked about. The left-wing radicals in the “news” outlets scream about things but don’t really get the facts right. They make stuff up and pass it off as truth.

I agree with your last paragraph, Jake.

I don’t think I’ve seen this shared yet. It’s from Heather Cox Richardson:

This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.

It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has. It is similar to what Trump did to Biden during a debate in 2020. In that case, though, the lack of muting on the mics left Biden simply saying: “Will you shut up, man?” a comment that resonated with the audience. Giving Biden the enforced space to answer by killing the mic of the person not speaking tonight actually made the technique more effective.

There are ways to combat the Gish gallop—by calling it out for what it is, among other ways—but Biden retreated to trying to give the three pieces of evidence that established his own credentials on the point at hand. His command of those points was notable, but the difference between how he sounded at the debate and how he sounded on stage at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, just a day afterward suggested that the technique worked on him.

That’s not ideal, but as Monique Pressley put it, “The proof of Biden’s ability to run the country is the fact that he is running it. Successfully. Not a debate performance against a pathological lying sociopath.”

A much bigger deal is what it says that the television media and pundits so completely bought into Trump’s performance. They appear to have accepted Trump’s framing of the event—that he is dominant—so fully that the fact Trump unleashed a flood of lies and non-sequiturs simply didn’t register. And, since the format established that the CNN journalists running the debate did not challenge anything either candidate said, and Dale’s fact-checking spot came long after the debate ended, the takeaway of the event was a focus on Biden’s age rather than on Trump’s inability to tell the truth or form a coherent thought.

At the end of the evening, pundits were calling not for Trump—a man liable for sexual assault and business fraud, convicted of 34 felonies, under three other indictments, who lied pathologically—to step down, but for Biden to step down…because he looked and sounded old. At 81, Biden is indeed old, but that does not distinguish him much from Trump, who is 78 and whose inability to answer a question should raise concerns about his mental acuity.

I think our biggest problem is how unbelievably STUPID he is.
Did you know he wants to stop California from “draining” their water into the Pacific.

@seawulf575 I watched the debate. you can’t get me to waste more time by pretending you have a point.

@Dutchess_III What is that about? What water into the Pacific? I just ask because I don’t remember hearing anything about that.

I remember people calling Trump stupid for blaming forest fires in California on not taking care of the leaves and dead trees on the ground, and he was actually right that it was and is part of the problem in the state. They want the focus on climate change, that is why they don’t want to hear any other excuses. I agree that climate change is a factor too, and needs to be addressed, but completely dismissing other problems does not help the causes Democrats care about, it just gives the Republicans more ammunition. You have me wondering if there is a lot of wasted water going into the ocean, or maybe polluted water, I don’t know what the water issue is about.

ALL water eventually makes it’s way to an ocean. It’s part of the natural water cycle.

“They have so much water,” Trump said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland in February, recounting an interaction with an unnamed California congressmember: “I said, ‘I see you have a drought.’ They said, ‘No, we don’t have a drought. We have so much water you don’t know what to do.’ But they send it out to the Pacific. We’re not going to let them get away with that any longer.”

@Dutchess_III I think he just oversimplifies. I’m sure part of his schtick is to deny climate change. He takes bits and pieces of what he is told and puts it together in his head and thinks he’s some sort of whiz kid. Some of the information is true usually.

I’m pretty sure there is no drought in California now. If there is, it’s in very few parts of the state.

Can’t oversimplified what you don’t understand in the first place @JLeslie.

^^I mean simple as in he is ignoring a lot of important information or doesn’t understand it.

But, here is an article about runoff water in California. https://calmatters.org/environment/water/2024/02/capturing-california-stormwater/#:~:text=The%20nationwide%20report%2C%20by%20researchers,picked%20up%20along%20the%20way.