Trump’s Lies Are Finally Catching Up to Him

There is perhaps no one in the world better at stretching and bending the truth to fit his narrative than Donald Trump. This is the man, after all, whose first term in office gave us the phrase “alternative facts.”

But lately, Trump’s truth contortions have reached a breaking point, so much so that even he seems to struggle to keep his story straight.

Nowhere is this more obvious than on the issue of tariffs. During a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, Trump had a mask-slip moment when he acknowledged that his trade war would likely increase product prices in the United States. “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. So maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally,” Trump said.

Say what you want about Marie Antoinette, but at least “let them eat cake” was snappy.

But just as he appeared to be owning the impact tariffs will have in driving costs upward—precisely the opposite of his Make America Affordable Again promise—Trump tried to blame the flagging economic numbers on former President Joe Biden. “This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s,” he wrote on Truth Social.

It was the literal flip side of a January 2024 post in which Trump boasted, “THIS IS THE TRUMP STOCK MARKET,” as the market soared to record highs under Biden. For those keeping track at home: This means it’s the “Trump stock market” when Biden’s president and the economy’s growing and the “Biden stock market” when Trump’s president and it’s tanking. Still with us? Great.

Trump’s outburst on Wednesday came after the Commerce Department announced that the US GDP shrunk 0.3% during Trump’s first three months in office. That dip, the Bureau of Economic Analysis wrote, “primarily reflected an increase in imports.” In fact, the first quarter for 2025 saw the largest import surge since the pandemic, as companies scrambled to bring in foreign-made goods before Trump’s tariffs set in. By contrast, during the last three months of Biden’s presidency, GDP grew 2.4%.

In his post on Truth Social, Trump tried to claim that once tariffs are in place and companies bring manufacturing to the US, the state of the US economy will turn around. But economists, who predicted the situation would only get worse by the end of the year, aren’t buying it.

Neither, it turns out, are voters.

Trump’s doublespeak is so obvious that just 37% of US adults now approve of his handling of the economy, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll. Trump has sought to shape this to fit his narrative of utter triumph too, writing on Truth Social this week, “The Polls from the Fake News are, like the News itself, FAKE! We are doing GREAT, better than ever before.”

It is, frankly, getting a little desperate. Trump is losing his grip on the story he’s always controlled best—his own. His mixed messages on tariffs, contradictory economic claims, and increasingly obvious attempts to deflect blame have created narrative whiplash. This blatant mythmaking in the face of all evidence to the contrary is, of course, ripped from the authoritarian playbook. Is it any wonder that, according to one new poll, more than half of all Americans now view him as a “dangerous dictator?”