ArcaMax

The great American humorist Josh Billings once said, “There are some people so addicted to exaggeration that they can’t tell the truth without lying.”

That may be charming in a storyteller, but in a president, that’s truly dangerous.

To put it bluntly, in addition to being a serial exaggerator, Donald Trump is also a liar. On the Wikipedia page for Trump’s false statements, it begins with a scathing indictment:

“Donald Trump has made tens of thousands of false or misleading claims, including during his first and second terms as president of the United States.”

It goes on to note that fact-checkers at The Washington Post “documented 30,573 false or misleading claims during his first presidential term, an average of 21 per day.” And, “Commentators and fact-checkers have described Trump’s mendacity as unprecedented in American politics, and the consistency of falsehoods as a distinctive part of his business and political identities.”

In other words, our president’s defining character trait, more than anything else, is lying.

That’s bad, of course. In moments of crisis or calamity, we should be able to count on our elected leaders, including and especially the president, to tell us the truth.

But this is precisely when Trump tends to lie the most. He lied about what happened on Jan. 6, for example. He continues to lie about the 2020 election. He’s lied about Gaza, Russia, migrants, tariffs, our allies, members of Congress, and so much more.

So when Trump says U.S. airstrikes last weekend “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities, it would be great if we could take him at his word.

But we can’t.

A bombshell report from CNN revealed that the core components of Iran’s nuclear program were not destroyed, and only set back the country’s enrichment by months. That’s according to an early U.S. intelligence assessment produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s intel service.

Two people familiar with the report told CNN that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not destroyed, and another said the centrifuges are largely “intact.”

The White House is calling this report “flat-out wrong,” and Trump has been on a tear cutting down the “fake news” media for reporting on his own Defense Department’s assessment.

At the NATO summit in the Netherlands this week, Trump insisted the strikes set back Iran’s nuke capabilities “for many years to come,” and that the strikes were “so bad that they ended the war” between Israel and Iran.

Trump, exaggerating as he’s wont to do, compared the strikes on Iran’s nuke sites to Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the two atomic bombs that leveled entire cities.

Trump is so distrusted that even Republican lawmakers don’t know what to believe.

Sen. Rand Paul was asked on Fox Business whether he accepted the president’s declaration that the strikes obliterated Iran’s nuke facilities, and he responded, “I don’t know what to accept. I have heard the leaks. I’ve also heard the press secretary say that top secret things shouldn’t be released, implying that there was actually a report saying this.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune was also unable to confirm Trump’s claims, saying, “Well, I don’t — I’m not sure I have, uh — you might want to hear from Sen. [Tom] Cotton, who chairs the intelligence committee, and answer on the full extent….”

Sen. Lindsey Graham also said “I don’t know” when asked if the program was destroyed. Roger Wicker, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, could only say, “We’re looking at it.”

This is categorically indefensible. That elected lawmakers, of the president’s own party, who in some cases head intelligence and military committees, do not believe the president, is a total failure of leadership and a corruption of the office. That Trump knows he can lie with relative impunity is a total failure of Congress to provide necessary checks and balances on his power.

So where does that leave us, the electorate? With trust in the media at record lows — thanks in large part to Trump’s continual degrading of the press to help make his own lies more believable — no one seems to know what to believe. That, shamefully, makes us not very different from Iran, Russia, and North Korea, where the public is fed propaganda and lies by their governments and largely kept in the dark.

It’s a sad state of affairs. When you have a president who lies as often and as easily as Trump does, even something as quantifiable as an airstrike becomes slippery and unknowable.

And I don’t have to remind you what happens when bad decisions are made based on bad information.

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(S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.)

©2025 S.E. Cupp. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.