Trump’s Lying Now Produces Deadly, Costly, and Soon Calamitous Consequences

By Ralph Nader

May 23, 2025

The chronic lies of Der Führer Trump, hour by hour, day after day, are having deadly and costly impacts on the American people, with many more casualties in the pipeline of wreckage he and his henchman Elon Musk have wrought since January 20.

Trump’s lies, threats, and fake promises come from what dozens of psychologists who in 2017 perceived Trump as possessing an “unstable, dangerous personality.” Trump, a serial megalomaniac, announced recently: “I RUN THE COUNTRY AND THE WORLD.”

Confident that he can violate any law, any constitutional restraint, any international treaty, Dangerous Donald says he is “having fun,” flipping out one illegal executive order after another with cruel and vicious hammer blows against:

• Dedicated civil servants performing crucial tasks for Americans he has fired or replaced;
• Recent immigrants, paying taxes and working essential jobs at low wages (harvesting our food, cleaning up after us, caring for our children and elderly, for example); and
• Law enforcers and courts who worked to bring him to justice. The list of Trump’s wreckage is endless.

The torrent of Trumpian falsehoods have their own mass media – his own social media – and the mainstream media which still reports them out, including repeating his CAPITAL LETTERS, without giving his victims any right of reply, even when they are named. True, the mass media now tells us when some of his wild and crazy concoctions are “false” like his shameless false claim that a picture of graves was purportedly of slain white South African farmers.

But fact-checking doesn’t reach most of the people who receive Trump’s lies. For these people, his carve-outs of reality are unrebutted. Unfathomably, reporters do not demand that he, Donald Trump, provide the evidence and the legal basis for his prevarications every single time they impact policy. Rarely, when they do, as in the case of Trump alleging widespread fraud by Social Security recipients, he backed off.

Mostly, however, starting with his endless assertion that he won the 2020 election “in a landslide,” eye-rolling reporters and editors don’t seem to see any point in routinely saying to him: “Prove it or admit you are mistaken.” In the vernacular – “put up or shut up.”

It doesn’t matter that Know-it-all Trump never admits any wrongdoing, any mistake, any failure, or any broken promises to his believing MAGA supporters. What matters is after a while, more and more people begin to see that he’s a fake, a delusionary con man and turn against him and proclaim “YOU’RE FIRED!”

For now, ensconced in the White House, Trump’s lies are no longer just words; they have deadly and costly effects and can soon produce calamitous consequences.

Here are some samples. Trump falsely dismisses with repeated disbelief the violent climate crises – notwithstanding record wildfires, floods, hurricanes, sea level rise and droughts.  His response to these problems: push to abolish FEMA, already firing thousands of staff. He is also dismissing scientists who study, document and predict approaching climate disasters, from federal agencies, including the National Weather Service, and the EPA and cutting grants to scientific organizations and Universities.

He continues to scoff at expert predictions of emerging pandemics, as he did in early 2020, mocking and dillydallying, while COVID-19 spread, resulting in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.  His response to these perils: strip-mine the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health expert staff and their grants to outside scientists.

He falsely asserts that over-regulation of widespread corporate crookery is harming the economy and costing jobs. His response to these falsehoods: close down agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, firing regulators illegally, taking the federal cops off the corporate crime beat and, recently, just openly failing to enforce the law at all and dropping existing criminal cases against over 100 companies, including the Boeing crimes crashing two 737 Max aircraft.

He absurdly and cravenly asserts the super-rich and giant corporations are over-taxed. His response to this ridiculous allegation:  push through Congress super-rich tax cuts, ballooning the deficit, forcing cuts in Medicaid and even Medicare, afflicting people with disabilities, and closing many rural hospitals (See, New York Times: What’s in Trump’s Tax Bill?) He grotesquely describes this legislation as a “big, beautiful bill” even though it will cut critical feeding programs for poor children, severely weaken “Meals on Wheels,” “Head Start,” and federal food inspection programs.

Millions of people would lose health insurance and other life-saving and life-sustaining social safety nets. Savagely, Trump is increasing the bloated, wasteful military budget far beyond what the Generals asked for and loading tens of billions of dollars onto the Department of Homeland Security to police a relatively quiet southern border and contract for more private prisons to hold immigrants or asylum seekers whom they round up.

If the Senate doesn’t throw out this House-passed bill (by one vote) and only tweaks it on its way to the enriching Trump and his bloody pen, consider this the beginning of the end for the Republican Party in the coming elections. For Trump is ruthlessly skewering both Red and Blue state voters and families, breaking contracts with small businesses, rescinding popular clean energy programs, reducing student loans, and roiling the stock markets holding the savings and pensions of tens of millions of conservative and liberal families. He is going berserk against the American people while shielding massive corporate crime and corporate welfare from law and order.

It would help this growing movement of street protests against Trump if, to take two institutions, banding together as labor unions and universities they stop cowering before the Tyrant and roar back with all their unused, formidable influence and members. Bully Donald has come a long way using intimidation to pick off his victims because they do not push back in an organized fashion.

Moreover, the feeble Democratic Party just doesn’t fire its corporate-conflicted consultants, and retire its serial losers controlling its leadership, which lost elections to the worst most vulnerable GOP in history. They should patriotically quit and welcome younger, progressive leaders, some already challenging corporate Democrats in the coming primaries, to take over and replace decay and despair with dynamism and dexterity. These challengers know they are in a race against time and have no time for the lumbering, bureaucratic, disarrayed entrenched Democratic apparatchiks to lose our Republic to a fascistic dictatorship wrecking our country at warp speed.

This younger generation should connect with older, seasoned progressive Democrats who for decades have been fighting for real reforms in our country and are eager to lend their experience and advice. They include former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who in 2001 penned an op-ed in the Washington Post declaring “…The Democratic Party. It’s Dead.” Other stalwarts include Jim Hightower (Texas), Joel Rogers (Wisconsin), Robert Kuttner (Boston), Bishop William Barber (North Carolina), Joan Claybrook (DC), Mark Green, co-author with me of the book on Trump titled WRECKING AMERICA (2020) and many others.

These people and others (see winningamerica.net) do not have marbles in their mouths; they know how to communicate with people on forward directions supported by a megamajority of liberal and conservative voters. (See my 2014 book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance To Dismantle The Corporate State).