For nearly four years, Daniel Dale’s job with CNN was to fact-check whatever Donald Trump said.
“The job was unrelenting,” he would write later. “The job was unrelentingly weird. Lots of politicians lie as a means to an end – to wiggle out of a scandal or to inflate their policy accomplishments. Trump was willing to lie about everything, all the time, often for no obvious reason. This was lying as a way of life. And it took over much of my own life.”
So, when I read Dale’s admittedly subjective choice of Trump’s top 25 lies of 2025, I knew I had to share them. It’s a great portrait of Trump, a rich likeness that all of us should carry with us into the new year.
Dale wrote long explanations with each quote he chose, but for the sake of length I condensed them to their essence. If you would like to read Dale’s entire piece, click here. Otherwise, I present to you one fact-checker’s list of the Top 25 lies Trump delivered in 2025:
Trump secured $17 trillion or $18 trillion in investment in 2025. While Trump was claiming that in a speech, the White House website had the number at $8.8 trillion, but CNN’s investigation riddled holes in even that claim.
“Every price is down.” Everyone who pays bills knows most prices are up.
Trump was reducing prescription drug prices by “2,000%, 3,000%.” That’s just plain stupid. A decline of anything more than 100% would mean that pharmacies would have to pay you to take their medications.
Foreign countries pay the U.S. government’s tariffs. Not even close. Tariffs are levied on importers, not foreign countries, and those importers usually pass them on to their customers — us.
Portland was “burning down” and “burning to the ground.” There was no fire, anywhere. Portland residents, officials and media outlets kept telling Trump that, but he kept on blaring the lie anyway.
Washington, D.C., had no murders for six months. Washington had more than 50 homicides during those six months, according to police statistics and Washington Post tracking.
“I invaded Los Angeles and we opened up the water.” Trump linked wildfires in Los Angeles to an unrelated effort to use some of California’s water to protect a fish species hundreds of miles to the north, and called it a great success. But all he actually did was pointlessly move about 2 billion gallons of water from one part of California’s Central Valley to another part of that valley.
The Democratic governor of Maryland called Trump “the greatest president of my lifetime.” Trump claimed Wes Moore said that when the two met in private at an Army-Navy football game. However, a camera recording behind-the-scenes footage for a documentary show picked up the conversation, and it proved Trump was lying.
Ukraine “started” Russia’s war on Ukraine. Russia undeniably started the war by invading Ukraine.
Trump was speaking “in jest” when he promised to immediately end the Ukraine war. Hogwash. When a journalist asked Trump about his unfulfilled pledge to end the war as soon as he took office, Trump answered, “Obviously, people know that when I said that, it was said in jest.” The record shows it most definitely was not.
The U.S. government had planned to spend $50 million on “condoms for Hamas.” When fact checkers pointed out there was no basis for that claim, Trump, instead of admitting he lied, inflated the invented figure to $100 million.”
Every drug boat in the Caribbean “kills 25,000 Americans.” Impossible. Federal data shows that the total number of U.S. overdose deaths from all drugs in 2024 was about 82,000.
Trump “didn’t say he had no problem releasing full footage of a September boat strike.” Provably untrue. On Dec. 3, Trump was recorded telling an ABC News reporter that he would “certainly” release, “no problem,” all Pentagon footage of a follow-up strike the military conducted on a suspected drug-smuggling boat off the coast of Venezuela that killed two survivors of the initial strike. On Dec. 8, he told another ABC News reporter, “I didn’t say that.”
Numerous foreign leaders emptied prisons and mental institutions to send their most undesirable people into the U.S. Trump often claims that foreign countries “all over the world” empty their prisons and mental institutions of rapists and murderers and dump them on the United States, but he has never named one foreign leader who did that, and immigration officials say it has never happened.
Trump ended seven or eight wars. While campaigning for a Nobel Peace Prize, he asserted at the United Nations that he “ended seven wars, and in all cases, they were raging, with countless thousands of people being killed.” As evidence, he named the Egypt-Ethiopia and Serbia-Kosova conflicts, neither of which happened during his presidency; the Thailand-Cambodia conflict and a war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, both of which were still active when he spoke; and the India-Pakistan conflict, which officials in both countries said Trump had nothing to do with ending. Trump later started claiming he “ended eight wars” after he helped to broker an October ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and he kept claiming it even after killing in Gaza resumed.
“The people of Canada like” the idea of becoming the 51st U.S. state. Pure nonsense. Polls consistently show that about 90 percent of Canadians hate the idea.
Capitol rioters “didn’t assault.” Oh yes they did. Trump has claimed that the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters “had no guns” even though video recordings prove multiple rioters did. He said that rioter Ashli Babbitt “was innocently standing there, they even say trying to sort of hold back the crowd,” when she was killed by a Capitol Police officer, even though video recordings plainly show she was shot while climbing into the Capitol through a broken window. Trump even claimed that the rioters “didn’t assault,” although several videos clearly prove that they did.
Critical media coverage of Trump is “illegal.” Critical coverage of government, including the president, is the news media’s most important job.
Trump didn’t pressure the Justice Department to go after his opponents. Of course he did. A journalist asked Trump in late October if he had told the Justice Department to “go after” three of his political opponents who had recently been indicted – former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Trump answered, “No, and not in any way, shape or form. No.” However, less than two months prior, Trump had written a post on Truth Social that publicly pressured the head of the Justice Department, Attorney General Pam Bondi, to take legal action “NOW” against Comey and James (plus another Trump foe, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff).
Obama, Biden and Comey made up the Epstein files. Trump once promised to release the files, but when he learned his name was in them “multiple times” he began doing everything he could to block their release. Perhaps his wildest and most obvious lie came in July when he said, “You know, these files were made up by Comey, they were made up by Obama, they were made up by the Biden (administration).” The Epstein files are real documents that were not “made up” by anyone.
The 2020 election was ‘”rigged and stolen.” Trump has been peddling that nonsense since the election, although poll watchers from America and throughout the world agree it was one of the cleanest elections ever.
The US is “the only country in the world” with mail-in voting and birthright citizenship. Dozens of other countries use mail-in voting, and dozens more have birthright citizenship.
Babies get 80-plus vaccines at once. Babies don’t get that many vaccines in total, let alone all at once.
Trump’s “big beautiful” domestic policy bill didn’t change Medicaid. Oh, yes it did. Big time. The bill made major changes to Medicaid rules, cut hundreds of billions of dollars intended for the program, and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says it will result in millions of people being uninsured in 2034.
The domestic policy bill was “the single most popular bill ever signed.” Multiple polls showed that the bill was highly unpopular – more unpopular than any major bill passed in more than 30 years, according to one scholar’s analysis.
And that, folks, is the President of the United States. Are you proud?
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