What’s In a Lie? On the Different Ways Politicians Mislead the Public

For years, political reporters and fact-checkers were reluctant to say a politician lied. That was partly because the word packed a wallop, and lying was seen as a serious allegation. (Those were more innocent times.) Also, the journalists were trying to be consistent with the definition that a lie was “a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive.” How, they asked, could they know the politician’s intent?

In the last twenty years, particularly in the age of Trump, many of us loosened up and accepted other, broader definitions for the word. Merriam-Webster’s definitions include “an untrue or inaccurate statement that may or may not be believed true by the speaker or writer.” Even pre-Trump, when I created the Truth-O-Meter with my colleagues at PolitiFact, we made the lowest rating Pants on Fire. And every year, PolitiFact honors “The Lie of the Year” just as Time honors the Person of the Year.

For many journalists, the big turning point in using “lie” came in 2016, when the New York Times began using it for some of Trump’s whoppers. The first was his repeated bogus claim that President Obama was born in Kenya. Times editor Dean Baquet told NPR that “to say that that was a ‘falsehood’ wouldn’t have captured the duration of his claim [or] the outrageousness of his claim. I think to have called it just a falsehood would have put it in the category of, to be frank, ‘usual political fare,’ where politicians say, ‘My tax plan will save a billion dollars,’ but it’s actually a half a billion and they’re using the wrong analysis. This was something else. And I think we owed it to our readers to just call it out for what it was.”

Today, there’s still a range of opinions about using the word. Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post Fact Checker, uses it broadly to refer to Trump’s “election lies” or “the big lie.” FactCheck.org doesn’t use it. But maybe we’ve been too cautious. A 2018 study by researcher Paul Mena found a disconnect between journalists (68 percent of whom opposed the use of the word) and the public (20 percent opposed).

I was a holdout for many years. Even after the Times broke the barrier, I stuck to using “falsehood” and “false claim.” But I reconsidered as I realized the magnitude of the problem, and concluded that, in most cases, the politician knows they are lying. Also, I realized that in the real world people don’t draw such stark lines about the definitions. They know politicians lie. They may not like it, but they are very aware of it. In this book, I’m using “lie” and “lying” broadly to refer to both the overall phenomenon and individual falsehoods when I believe the person making the false charge knew it was false. Purists might quibble with that. But I believe that retreating to the semantic safety of the past cloaks the serious problem of lying that is threatening our political discourse (and that is the reason I wrote this book).

Another clarification about my terminology: A broken promise is not a lie. Although they are sometimes referred to that way, a broken promise is a separate political act and deserves its own category. At PolitiFact, we created a feature called the Obameter to track President Obama’s promises, an unprecedented undertaking that initially followed 508 things he vowed to do during the campaign, everything from “Provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants” to “Fund proposals to help fish and game survive climate change.” The Obameter inspired promise tracking by fact-checkers in other nations and prompted us to create more than a dozen meters that have tracked the promises of mayors and governors around the United States. Together, these efforts contribute to a unique form of journalism that goes beyond fact-checking in holding politicians accountable.

*

After talking with dozens of politicians, candidates, and political operatives for this book, I’ve realized that lies come in many shapes and flavors. They vary in severity, type, and technique. In this chapter, I’ve put together a short taxonomy to sort them out.

Severity

Some lies are serious. Others, not so much. I think of them on a continuum, with innocent lies at one end and more serious ones at the other.

“Under-the-lights” mistakes: At PolitiFact, we used this phrase to indicate any minor error that was clearly accidental, a slip of the tongue, like one said under the glare of TV lights. Politicians sometimes confuse the names of states or fumble a statistic. That doesn’t make a mistake into a lie.

White lies: These are the small, innocent falsehoods that lubricate our politics—the praises and boasts and innocent commitments that won’t be kept. They were summed up best by Robert Bauer, the White House counsel to President Obama, who told me in an interview, “To be a politician, you have to periodically, maybe systematically and hopefully skillfully and with some retention of a moral sense, deceive people.” Bauer then pretended to be one and declared, “I’m standing next to Bill Adair, who is one of the finest journalists of his generation.” (I was deeply offended that Bauer would use me in his example of lying, particularly because I consider him one of the finest political attorneys of his generation.) He then explained, “Some politicians are really good at it, and I admire them enormously, and I don’t think they’re liars. Other politicians are liars because they’re bad politicians or they’re corrupt politicians. But I don’t think you can separate politics from deception at all.”

Misdemeanor lies: These are lies that often use numbers and claims about broad topics to mislead voters: Inflation has been down since I became president. We’re closing the achievement gap in our classrooms. They are more nerdy than malicious. They don’t target anyone in particular but still make sweeping false claims about a group or trend.

Felony lies: Stark and serious, they move the needle and are more likely to have consequences. Felony lies are often targeted at someone, such as the attacks on Nina Jankowicz. They stoke prejudice or threaten a key element in our democratic system, such as the integrity of voting. They are our big lies that take us to war. As political scientist Brendan Nyhan put it to me, “There’s a difference between politicians lying to cover up some misdeed and lying to try to overturn democracy.”

Types of Lies

Lies about accomplishments: Elected officials love to brag about what they’ve done in office. But they often stretch the truth…a lot. Trump did this to ridiculous extremes, lying about the impact of the border wall (no, it didn’t drive down crime in El Paso), the size of his tax cut (no, it wasn’t the largest in history), and his health care policy (no, it didn’t “save” pre-existing conditions), among many other topics. Other politicians make false claims by cherry-picking the most favorable time period.

Self-defense lies: When a politician is accused of a crime or implicated in a scandal, lying is often their first line of defense. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I did not email any classified material to anyone. Sometimes they will try a trick we could call leveraging a lie, when they find a small flaw in an otherwise true allegation and then use that to discount the entire allegation. That was Bill Clinton’s strategy with Lewinsky, when he narrowly defined sexual relations to not include oral sex. Others have used a similar approach in response to a devastating investigative report by a news organization. The politician will simply decry it as “a false report” without saying what’s false and what’s true. Eric Jotkoff, a Democratic strategist, sums this one up as “you get caught with your hand in the cookie jar and you lie.”

Lies attacking opponents: These are the staple of modern campaigns, the wild exaggerations made by candidates and the political parties. They are leveled by both parties and are distinguished by a unique art form—campaign ads and internet videos in which producers find the most unflattering photos available. (A consultant I know once bragged that she was particularly skilled at finding awful photos of opponents.)

Lies about policy and issues: This broad category includes a wide range of falsehoods on everything from abortion to immigration to crime. They are the bulk of political lies, the fast food of the American discourse. The Lie of the Year, PolitiFact’s choice of the most significant falsehood, is typically about policy. Some of the honorees: the claims that Obamacare included “death panels” (2009); that Obamacare was “a government takeover of health care” (2010); “If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan” (2013); and the denial and downplay of the coronavirus (2020).

How They Lie

Political liars have a variety of tricks in their playbook that can be quite effective at fooling their target audience. Here’s a look at some of their more common techniques. (Some lies use more than one.)

Cherry-picking: This is my favorite technique because it can sometimes be quite obvious—yet they do it anyway. The liar simply chooses the most favorable time period or condition for their claim while ignoring the larger reality that tells a different story. They tell about one quarter but ignore the other three. It’s wonderfully deceptive.

Repetition: There’s an old saying that if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. Many U.S. politicians follow this advice, repeating their falsehoods despite much debunking. That was most famously the case with the lie that Trump won the 2020 election, but it’s also the case with many talking points from the political parties. Kessler, the Washington Post Fact Checker, calls them “zombie claims” because, like zombies, they will not die.

Up is down: Tim Miller, a former communications director for Republican campaigns, used this phrase to describe bald-faced lies, when facts clearly prove a claim is wrong. He also referred to these as “Trumpian lies,” citing the former president’s insistence that his inauguration crowd was the largest ever, despite photo evidence to the contrary.

Exaggeration: Some of the simplest lies are just bigger and bolder than reality. Most probably are considered half-truths, but the big ones qualify as lies.

Prediction: These are lies that look ahead and exploit uncertainty. An example from the 1970s: conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly’s warnings about the Equal Rights Amendment, which fizzled in 1982 after it failed to be ratified by enough states. Schlafly’s extreme warnings about the amendment surely played a role. She had predicted that passage would “absolutely and positively make women subject to the draft,” “abolish a woman’s right to child support and alimony,” and deprive American women of many “fundamental special privileges” such as the right “(1) NOT to take a job, (2) to keep her baby, and (3) to be supported by her husband.”

Fear: The most effective lies strike a chord with the recipient, and the ones that invoke fear are especially potent. When my research assistants analyzed hundreds of lies, they found a large portion of them tried to invoke fear—of economic loss, physical harm, or damage to property. Both parties use this technique. Democrats try to scare senior citizens with false claims that Republicans are going to take away their Medicare and Social Security. Republicans use scary claims of immigration and crime.

__________________________________

From Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy by Bill Adair. Copyright © 2024. Available from Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.