By Daniel Dale, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump tells a lot of lies. Trump also regularly accuses others of lying.

And sometimes he does both at once – telling a lie about something while accusing someone else of lying about it. In other words, the president has been dishonest even about others’ honesty.

It’s a subset of his years-old “I know you are but what am I?” tactic of trying to turn common criticisms of him against his opponents. And he’s used it a bunch this fall.

Trump’s deception about supposed deception from Democrats and his former FBI director

One perfect example: Trump has repeatedly alleged that Democrats are lying when they correctly say overall prices and grocery prices are up during his second presidency – even though it is Trump who is lying when he says overall prices and grocery prices are down.

“The problem with the Democrats: they lie. They do it so well. They talk about affordability, but I’m the one that’s getting the prices down,” he told reporters Sunday, though overall prices were 3% higher in September than they were in September 2024 and 1.7% higher than they were in January 2025, the month he returned to office. “More than anything else, it’s a con job by the Democrats,” since “costs are way down,” Trump falsely said last week on Fox News.

Then, on Monday morning, Trump claimed on social media that Christopher Wray, whom he appointed as FBI director during his first term, had “lied!!!” about the deployment of FBI agents on January 6, 2021, the day Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol. But the president’s supposed basis for this claim was a false conspiracy theory that FBI agents had been secretly inserted into the pre-riot Capitol crowd to whip up a frenzy.

The phony narrative was debunked in September by none other than Trump’s current FBI director, Kash Patel, who noted that the agents were deployed for crowd control “after the riot was declared by Metro Police.”

Trump chooses colorful fiction over fact-based ammunition

In late October, Trump attacked the integrity of former president Joe Biden in a speech to a military audience – saying, “Biden used to say he was a pilot. He was a pilot, he was a truck dri— whatever, whoever walked in. He wasn’t a pilot.” Biden did falsely claim during his presidency to have previously been a truck driver, among other inaccurate claims about his past, but there is no record of him having claimed to have been a pilot. In other words, Trump was making something up – again – while calling out Biden for supposedly making something up.

Biden’s actual fabrications about his biography would give Trump ample material for attacks. But Trump often discards fact-based ammunition in favor of colorful fiction.

Take what Trump said about Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut when the president announced in October that he was commuting the prison sentence of former Republican Rep. George Santos, who had pleaded guilty to federal wire fraud and aggravated identity theft charges after gaining notoriety for numerous lies about his biography.

Trump posted on social media that Blumenthal’s actions were “far worse.” Trump claimed that Blumenthal had lied for nearly two decades that, while serving in the Vietnam War, he “was ‘a Great Hero’” and “endured the worst of the War, watching the Wounded and Dead as he raced up the hills and down the valleys, blood streaming from his face.”

There is no record of Blumenthal claiming to have been a war hero, nor of Blumenthal claiming to have been injured in Vietnam, seen wounded or deceased people, fought in battles, or run through any particular terrain.

Blumenthal, who served in the Marine Corps Reserve in the US during the war, did falsely claim on at least a few occasions in the 2000s that he served in Vietnam itself. But Blumenthal – who accurately described his service on other occasions, and apologized in 2010 for the misstatements – told none of the vivid stories about taking part in deadly fights that Trump attacked him for supposedly telling.

Trump has told similar lies about Blumenthal’s supposed lies for more than seven years now.

Echoes of Trump’s other baseless attacks on the integrity of people and institutions

Trump’s attacks on the honesty of his political foes echo some of his best-known attacks on American institutions. Consider his frequent claims that accurate media reports are “fake news” and that the legitimate 2020 election he lost was “rigged and stolen.”

In those cases, as with his claims this week about inflation and January 6, he has presented himself as a paragon of truth while deceptively undermining the reputations of people who have actually been truthful.

The-CNN-Wire
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