At a campaign event in Arizona late last week, Donald Trump spent a predictable amount of time targeting Vice President Kamala Harris, specifically telling his supporters, “Nobody lies like her. She is a liar. She makes up crap.”
The Republican’s rhetoric was rather ironic. After all, the former president is not only the most prolific liar in recent memory, he makes stuff up on a daily basis. Indeed, minutes after insisting that the Democratic nominee “makes up crap,” Trump told the same audience that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz “approved a bill to give tampons in every young man’s bathroom.”
In reality, Walz did no such thing. In a speech in which the GOP candidate complained about campaign dishonesty, he peddled campaign dishonesty.
Two days later, Team Trump released a campaign ad that insisted the Biden/Harris administration has “literally unleashed the IRS to harass workers who receive tips.” As a Washington Post fact-check report explained, that didn’t happen.
To recap, the Trump campaign claims Harris can’t be trusted on her no-tax tip plan because the IRS proposed a plan to streamline three programs to help employers calculate tip income. But the proposal has been shelved. So, leaving aside the exaggerations about what the proposal would do, it’s simply false to claim Harris “literally unleashed the IRS to harass workers who receive tips.”
Note, this wasn’t an off-hand and unscripted comment at a rally; the Trump campaign carefully included this specific phrasing in a paid television ad. The Republican operation almost certainly knew the claim was baseless, but the former president and his 2024 team pushed it anyway.
A day later, Trump spoke at the National Guard Association’s conference and took care to blame Harris for America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago, despite the fact that (a) it wasn’t Harris’ call, (b) Trump’s the one who negotiated the withdrawal agreement, and (c) his own White House national security adviser said Trump bears some responsibility for what transpired. All of which leaves the political world with an awkward question: If Harris and Walz are as awful as Republicans claim, shouldn’t Trump be able to make a compelling case against them without making stuff up? Shouldn’t it be easy for the GOP nominee and his allies to stick to reality-based critiques? Doesn’t the fact that the former president has to rely so heavily on dishonesty reinforce the idea that maybe Harris and Walz aren’t so bad after all?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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