With All the Urgent Issues, Trump Focuses on Lies and Vanity Projects

In his recent interview with Kristen Welker on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Sunday, June 9, 2026, Donald Trump returned again to this loathsome “big lie” that he won the 2020 presidential election that because of massive fraud in the states, Biden was declared the winner.

Ever since that November 3rd day in 2020, Donald Trump has sung this Faustian leitmotif far off key as a constant refrain to excite and re-energize his sycophantic base and to protect his certifiable fragile narcissist ego from total collapse.

Political scientist, Lawrence Britt, enumerates 14 tenets of characteristics:

1. Powerful and continuing nationalism,
2. Disdain for the recognition of human rights,
3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats [of the country’s problems] as a unifying cause, 4. Rampant sexism,
4. Supremacy of the military,
5. Controlled mass media,
6. Obsession with national security,
7. Religion and government are intertwined,
8. Corporate power is protected,
9. Labor power is suppressed,
10. Disdain for intellectuals and the arts,
11. Obsession with crime and punishment,
12. Rampant cronyism and corruption, and
13. Fraudulent elections

Donald Trump checks the boxes in Britt’s characteristics. Regarding the last of these, number 14 (fraudulent elections), he not only tried to influence election officials in various states, like Georgie for example, to give him more votes than the earned, but he attempted to pressure his first term Vice President, Mike Pence, not to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.

Trump not merely attempted to illegally fix the election in his favor, but he reprises his perpetual “big lie” whenever his endorsed primary and election candidates face defeat.

Though he accused the Democratic Party of the “big lie” of “rigging” the 2020 election, all of Trump’s lies have been big and dangerous, with possibly the biggest being that he will “Make America Great Again.”

On “Meet the Press,” Welker asked President Trump about his so-called “weaponization fund” from which he intends to give large amounts of money to people – his supporters – whom he deemed to have been unfairly treated by the Department of Justice under President Joe Biden, for example, people arrested on insurrection charges after they stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Trump: “They had FBI agents ushering them into the building,” argued Trump on ‘Face the Nation.’ “They had FBI go into the building. Those people are walking around, they’re looking, ‘Oh, isn’t this nice?’ They weren’t in– they were being ushered into the building. The people were destroyed by dirty cops and by weaponization. Many of those people should be compensated.”

Welker: “All right, this is, just to be very clear, there’s no evidence of what you’re saying…”

Trump: “There’s a lot of evidence….There’s tremendous evidence. There’s nothing but evidence.”

Welker: “Well, it’s not been presented in a court of law.”

Trump: “The election [of 2020] was rigged. It was a dirty election.”

The president then accused the Democrats of stealing the Los Angeles mayoral election primary away from his endorsed candidate, Spencer Pratt. After some give and take on the California primary, Trump returned to his standard attack of demeaning primarily women journalist of color by accusing Kristin Welker:

Trump: “They’re crooked just like you’re crooked, your press is crooked. And ‘Meet the Press’ is crooked.”

Welker: “To be fair, I’m not crooked. But let’s continue.”

Trump: “…You’re either crooked or you’re stupid.”

Following his insults, Trump stormed off the stage and out of the NBC studios.

Trump seemed to get his “big lie” methods from other of his admired autocrats.

Adolph Hitler said:

“The great masses of the people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.” And, “The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.”

Trump (encapsulated in his alt-right, alt-facts, alt-universe), like other authoritarians, uses “Machiavellian” tactics in his single mindedness, cunning, plotting, and unscrupulous – sometimes vicious — actions in advancing his career, enacting his policies, and enhancing his power. To Trump, the ends certainly justify the means no matter who gets hurt.

Throughout his business career and into his presidency, while simultaneously vilifying the courts, Trump uses lawsuits as a means of intimidation to get his way and to vanquish his opposition. He continually threatens to employ libel laws to sue the “crooked and lying” media. We will most likely see more of these threats emerging from Trump’s Ministry of Propaganda (a.k.a. “White House Office of Communications”).

The major wealthier media outlets have the privilege and ability to stand up to Trump’s coercion, though some choose not to when they are dependent on him and members of his administration deciding on whether to grant them mergers or buyouts of other media companies.

Some of the smaller organizations who run on very tight budgets and depend on volunteer labor have no such privileges. For many of these smaller outlets, even the threat of a harassing lawsuit has resulted in self-censoring.

The problem, the big lie embedded within the far-right-facing MAGA insignia, is that it represents a call to action, a call to take the country back to an uncontested white Christian nativist United States in the German equivalent of an Aryan race where non-Aryans must be put in their “place,” expelled, or terminated.

The outcome of Trump’s lies resulted in over a million people dead from a pandemic, a collapse of the economy, further wage and health gaps between super rich and everyone else, insurrectionists attempting to hold the government and our democratic institutions hostage.

And for what? For a narcissistic sociopath to gain and hold onto power through appealing to white grievance politics.

The post-Trump Senate impeachment trial brought no degree of justice since the perpetrator returned to the scene of the crime, the Oval Office, with more power than ever. As his public ratings have plummeted to new depths, it seems perfectly clear that others – the colluders and actors in perpetuating the big lie – will suffer the consequences come November.

I have been struck time and time again by Trump’s lies and deceptions throughout the past post-factual nine years since he first announced his campaign for the presidency.

Most of us have read by now that the Washington Post had recorded 30,573 “untruths” during his first term, which averaged approximately 21 invalid claims a day. The most egregious claim, which had deadly consequences, was the “big lie” that he had been swindled out of beating Joe Biden for the presidency in November 2020, which resulted in an insurrection by his staunch supporters upon the Capitol of the United States.

Trump’s second term is no different for this Misstater-(Lier)-in-Chief. As the lies continue piling up, as he attempts to grab more power and his wealth through grifting soars, he again has attempted to redraw the maps and redefine the definition of “wining.”

President Donald Trump, as the clinically compulsive liar that he is, shouted yet another of his big lies that he and Netanyahu decided to go to war with Iran because it served our country’s self-interest due to the “imminent threat” Iran posed to the United States and to the world community. But there was no imminent threat.

Trump lied that Iran was very close to producing a nuclear weapon. That is not true. And now, Trump is literally asleep at the wheel (or at least at his desk in the Oval Office).

Enormous problems endanger our nation and the world: wars, inflation, unaffordable healthcare and childcare costs, ever rising energy prices, a global climate crisis, poverty, homelessness, food insecurity and starvation, spreading diseases, destructive animal parasites, democratic instability at home and abroad, gun violence, and so many others.

Instead of tackling these problems head on as a President of the United States must, Donald Trump has been fixated instead on his vanity projects of constructing an expensive and unnecessary White House ballroom, refurbishing the Reflection Pool between the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument and covering the roads between the Lincoln Memorial and the Potomac River, erecting the tallest victory arch, the Arch de Trump, near Arlington National Cemetery to overcompensate for Trump’s failed manhood, and other tacky and completed illegal extravagances.

How long will it take for Trump’s supporters to finally realize they have been duped by this con-artist who sold them his snake-oil-of-a-campaign-and-presidency of little value, which has had disastrous consequences?

How much longer can Trump’s enablers, and passive and active supporters, understand that they are hurting the country and sacrificing their own integrity and sense of dignity for the mere promise of a few shiny coins of glittering gold and the hot glow of fleeting power?

When voters relinquish their freedom for some sort of promised security, we are left with nothing at all.