Trump’s recent Four Pinocchio flights of fancy

Exploding cars, collapsing bridges, and a ban on cows have been added to his falsehood repertory.

Analysis by Glenn Kessler
October 21, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

Former president Donald Trump tells so many tall tales that it’s hard to keep track. Sometimes, one of his invented stories blows up into an actual news story, such as when he related a dramatic but fake tale of a helicopter ride he said he shared with Willie Brown, a former mayor of San Francisco, that involved a near-death experience and Brown, who once dated Kamala Harris, saying “terrible things” about her. Brown has said the ride never took place. Trump’s nonsensical story involving a sinking electric boat, a potential electrocution and a ferocious shark attack also earned news coverage — and mockery. (We won’t even begin to fact check whether his claim that Arnold Palmer was “all man” is true.)

But most of the time, Trump rambles on, in rally after rally, interview after interview, virtually unchecked in the friendly media environs he favors. We fact check when we can, but the overwhelming nature of his onslaught of falsehoods — and the trivial nature of many of them — makes it difficult to keep up. He has a standard repertory that he used often during his presidency, which he has augmented with updated or new false claims.

Here’s a list of some of his latest made-up stories, all of which would earn Four Pinocchios.

Hydrogen cars blow up and ‘you’re not even recognizable’

“If you want a gasoline-propelled car, if you want to have a hybrid, you should have it. You should be able to have it. The new thing is hydrogen. They have hydrogen cars. They have one problem — on occasion it will blow up and when it blows up, you are not recognizable. No, you’re not even recognizable. This is like a massive bomb being dropped. When it blows up, you are no longer — your wife cannot identify you. Let me put it that way.”

— Rally in Erie, Penn., Sept. 29

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