CNN’s Daniel Dale Counts Down Donald Trump’s ‘Top 25 Lies of 2025’

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CNN fact-checker extraordinaire Daniel Dale recounted 25 of Donald Trump’s “top lies of 2025,” although the journalist confessed it was hard to choose “only 25.”

Dale wrote on CNN.com that Trump’s “first calendar year back in the White House was an unceasing parade of lies,” much like his first term. The difference, according to Dale, was how often Trump repeated the same lies over and over with “staggering frequency.”

Trump relied on a “core set of go-to fabrications he deployed virtually no matter the setting and no matter how many times they had been debunked,” Dale explained.

Dale said he compiled his “highly subjective list” based on how often the president repeated the lie, “some because they were about notably consequential topics, and some because they were especially egregious in their distance from reality.”

When it came to the topic of inflation, tariffs, and the economy, Trump told four main whoppers:

• Lie: Trump secured $17 trillion or $18 trillion in investment in 2025
• Lie: ‘Every price is down’
• Lie: Trump was reducing prescription drug prices by ‘2,000%, 3,000%’
• Lie: Foreign countries pay the US government’s tariffs

Public safety lies, according to Dale included:

• Lie: Portland was ‘burning down’
• Lie: Washington, DC had no murders for six months
• Lie: ‘I invaded Los Angeles and we opened up the water’
• Lie: The Democratic governor of Maryland called Trump ‘the greatest president of my lifetime’

Dale listed a whopping eight “Trump lies” on foreign affairs:

• Lie: Ukraine ‘started’ Russia’s war on Ukraine
• Lie: Trump was speaking ‘in jest’ when he promised to immediately end the Ukraine war
• Lie: The US government had planned to spend $50 million on ‘condoms for Hamas’
• Lie: Every drug boat in the Caribbean ‘kills 25,000 Americans’
• Lie: Trump ‘didn’t say’ he had no problem releasing full footage of a September boat strike
• Lie: Numerous foreign leaders emptied prisons and mental institutions to send their most undesirable people into the US
• Lie: Trump ended seven or eight wars
• Lie: ‘The people of Canada like’ the idea of becoming the 51st US state

Other categories included Justice and Elections; as well as Health Care, Legislation, and Democrats.

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