This is an adapted excerpt from the March 5 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump told a lot of lies during his joint address to Congress on Tuesday. There were small lies, there were big lies and then there was the “big lie.”
It’s a deliberate attempt to alter reality, and it’s a pattern Trump established throughout the 2020 campaign and its aftermath.
Trump used perhaps the largest stage in the country to carry out a coordinated campaign of blatant falsehoods to systematically burn down and destroy an American institution. Trump has used this playbook before. In 2020, he undermined the legitimacy of America’s free and fair elections. On Tuesday, he used it to undermine the legitimacy of America’s most important safety net for its citizens: Social Security.
There is a pattern to what Trump is doing and what he has goaded other Republicans into saying. It’s a deliberate attempt to alter reality, and it’s a pattern he established throughout the 2020 campaign and its aftermath, all the way up to Jan. 6 and beyond. Despite the fact his legal team was laughed out of court dozens of times, Trump was obsessed with convincing his fan base that the voting system in the U.S, which is the gold standard for free elections around the world, was shot through with fraud.
This wasn’t a new obsession. In 2016, even before votes were counted, Trump alleged that the election was “rigged” against him. He ultimately won the election and, of course, didn’t challenge that outcome. But once he lost in 2020, Trump went back to his old playbook, particularly the myth of dead people voting for Democrats. It had been a fringe right-wing talking point for years, but Trump elevated the lie to new prominence.
He used it in his “perfect” phone call with Georgia’s then-secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to seemingly pressure the fellow Republican into rigging the state’s vote totals in his favor. Trump alleged that “close to 5,000” dead people voted in the state. Raffensperger later debunked that lie in his testimony to the House Jan. 6 committee, telling lawmakers his office found only four instances where ballots of dead residents were counted.
But Trump’s lies had a purpose. He wanted to destroy faith in the electoral system and America’s institutions. He executed the same playbook Tuesday, as he blasted out his new favorite “big lie” about a beloved government program that Republicans have long hated but that 71 million Americans currently rely on.
“We’re also identifying shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program,” Trump alleged Tuesday, adding: “Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old. It lists 3.6 million people from ages 110 to 119.”
“But we’re going to find out where that money is going, and it’s not going to be pretty,” Trump said.
While a government investigation released last year did find that the agency made improper payments from fiscal years 2015 through 2022, those payments accounted for less than 1% of the benefits paid out, and according to that report, most of the erroneous payments were overpayments to living people.
If you have ever had a loved one die while they were on Social Security, you know the checks don’t typically just keep coming. And Social Security automatically stops payments to people who are 115 years old — which I’m sure is a bureaucratic headache for the handful of Americans who have lived that long. The version of the lie Trump and his un-elected co-president, Elon Musk, are telling appears to be based on their inability to read the data they collected. As The Associated Press reports, with Social Security’s software system, “some entries with missing or incomplete birthdates will default to a reference point of more than 150 years ago.” On top of these lies, the Social Security Administration is already making drastic budget cuts to comply with Musk and DOGE’s mission. The agency has announced enormous layoffs and recommended closing offices across the country. Last month, a former Social Security commissioner, Martin O’Malley, warned that Trump and DOGE could put monthly benefit checks at risk: “Ultimately, you’re going to see the system collapse and an interruption of benefits.” The Social Security Administration is already making drastic budget cuts to comply with Musk and DOGE’s mission. “I believe you will see that within the next 30 to 90 days,” O’Malley told CNBC, adding that “people should start saving now” before payments stop. That’s an incredible statement, given that Social Security has never missed a monthly payment in its 90-year history. It is a program, like our voting system, that is incredibly free of widespread fraud. It is also insanely popular with the American populace, just like free and fair elections. In fact, about two-thirds of Americans think the government spends too little on Social Security. Trump knows that. That’s why he is telling a “big lie” about Social Security, just like he told the big election lie back in 2020. The objective now is the same as it was then: fabricate an elaborate, grotesque lie about a cherished institution of American government, and sow enough fear, doubt and uncertainty among enough people that they will let Trump destroy it.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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