Trump's Lies Are Killing Us: The Deadly Consequences of Big and Little Lies Everywhere

Trump's deadly lies represent a new stage in the backsliding of America away from democracy.

During the opening days of his first term, Trump achieved something remarkable: according to The New York Times, “He said something untrue, in public, every day for the first 40 days of his presidency.” His spokesperson, Kellyanne Conway, coined the Orwellian term “alternative facts” to try to justify Trump’s insistence, despite clear evidence to the contrary, that the crowd size at his inauguration was larger than Obama’s. By the time he was finally forced from office four years later, The Washington Post had logged 30,573 times that Trump had uttered false or misleading claims.

Trump’s lies, both big and small, have been corrosive to the foundations of civil society and democracy, which depend on a shared sense of reality. But the events of the first days of 2026 also show that they are deadly. They are literally killing us.

Given Trump’s inclination to dishonesty, his authoritarian leanings, and his inability to admit failure, it’s no surprise that he would respond to electoral defeat with what became known as The Big Lie: his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. What is remarkable is how willing his followers, including his stalwart white Christian supporters, were to embrace this lie.

On January 6, 2021, Trump’s endless “stop the steal” appeals produced the inevitable violent result in an attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Public opinion polls confirmed Trump’s hold on the minds of his followers. Despite Trump losing all 62 lawsuits claiming fraud in the 2020 election, and even after witnessing the violence at the Capitol, fully two thirds of Republicans and 61% of white evangelical protestants said that they believed the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

The Big Lie has had remarkable staying power among the MAGA base. Trump turned affirmation of the Big Lie into a loyalty test for administration appointments in his second term. And as they were casting their ballots in the 2024 election, PRRI data revealed that majorities of Republicans and white evangelicals (62% and 56% respectively), compared to only 31% of the public, continued to believe this false claim.

Just this week, ahead of the fifth anniversary of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Trump installed his Big Lie onto an ominous-looking page at the official White House website. The page includes intentionally glitchy black and white photos of the members of Congress who served on the bipartisan House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, while featuring cheery color photos of insurrectionists—several holding stuffed animals and their kids—who are labeled “patriots.” The narrative on that page erases turns the truth of that day on its head, reasserting the Big Lie and blaming the Democrats for the violence:

The Democrats masterfully reversed reality after January 6, branding peaceful patriotic protesters as “insurrectionists” and framing the event as a violent coup attempt orchestrated by Trump—despite no evidence of armed rebellion or intent to overthrow the government. In truth, it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election, ignoring widespread irregularities, and weaponizing federal agencies to hunt down dissenters….

These distortions of reality are not the first to happen on government websites under the Trump regime (see the widespread erasure of the contributions of women and people of color across various agency websites), but they are the most flagrant.

The brashness of these lies represent a new stage in the backsliding of America away from democracy. This desecration of the truth is a signal that the White House and the U.S. government, under this regime, has now officially become the propaganda machine for a mythomaniac and would-be dictator.

It is a mark of our time, in this second coming of the Trump regime, that Trump’s lies are no longer surprising. His lying is so expected that I doubt we’ll see any media outlet attempting to quantify them as they did during his first term. Today, the lies aren’t just spewing from Trump’s mouth during rants at rallies or late night insomnia-induced tirades on social media. They are now propagating on official government websites from the Oval Office to the Department of Homeland Security to the National Park Service to the Centers for Disease Control. We now must accept that nothing we read on official government websites can be trusted.

These cynical attacks on truth are also deadly. On January 6th, 2021, Trump’s Big Lie resulted in the deaths of one U.S. Capitol Police officer, along with four insurrectionists. It also contributed to the deaths of four other U.S. Capitol Police officers, who took their own lives after the experience of being violently assaulted by their fellow citizens.

And just yesterday, the evidence suggests that Renee Nicole Good—a U.S. citizen and mother of three—was killed in cold blood by an ICE officer while trying to drive away. Trump is lying about the encounter. “She behaved horribly,” Mr. Trump asserted in an interview with The New York Times. “And then she ran him over. She didn’t try to run him over. She ran him over.” The video evidence—independently analyzed and verified by Bellingcat, The New York Times Visual Investigation Team, and The Washington Post's Visual Forensic team—clearly contradicts Trump’s claims.

Screenshot from video by Caitlin Callenson, Minneapolis.

While some media outlets continue to hedge, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey is mincing no words. In a passionate and courageous public response, he said, “This was an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying, getting killed.. . . What I can tell you is the narrative that this was just done in self-defense is a garbage narrative that is not true…. It has no truth, and it needs to be stated very clearly.”

If we trace the chain of events that caused ICE agents to be deployed to Minneapolis in the first place, they are anchored in Trump’s lies. Trump has openly claimed that Minneapolis is being targeted because of its large Somali population, which is predominately Black and Muslim (a largely refugee population, by the way, that was assisted with resettlement by Lutheran Social Services with government support). At a cabinet meeting in December, as more than 2,000 ICE agents were first being deployed to Minnesota, Trump went on a racist screed, describing Somalia as a country that “stinks and we don’t want them in our country.” He went on to compare Somalis to “garbage” and falsely claimed that Somali gangs had “taken over” Minnesota and were “roving the streets looking for ‘prey.’”

We can trace a direct line from those racist lies by our president to the death of Renee Good. And to the 14 other shootings by ICE officers that have happened since late July. Just yesterday, ICE agents shot two more people at a traffic stop in Portland, Oregon, and then fled the scene before local police arrived. And I haven’t even mentioned the funerals for dozens of people, including civilians, killed in American strikes on Venezuela. Without Trump’s lies, all of these people would be with their families today.

There will be more of all of this to come in 2026: lies that beget violence and death, which beget more lies. We’ll need to grasp that living out the simple Christian dictum “the truth shall set you free” will be a dangerous task in Trump’s 2026 America.

With an ICE budget of $170 billion that was designated in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (a figure large enough to effectively end homelessness America, by the way), Trump’s lies are being manifested in the president’s own shock troops, guns, and concentration camps. And they are, eventually, coming for all of us if we do not rise up en masse in the name of truth this year.

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ICYMI