In Trump’s alternate reality, lies and distortions drive change
- The San Juan Daily Star
- Feb 25
- 5 min read
By Peter Baker
The United States sent $50 million in condoms to Hamas. Diversity programs caused a plane crash. China controls the Panama Canal. Ukraine started the war with Russia.
Except, no. None of that is true. Not that it stops President Donald Trump. In the first month since he returned to power, he has demonstrated once again a brazen willingness to advance distortions, conspiracy theories and outright lies to justify major policy decisions.
Trump has long been unfettered by truth when it comes to boasting about his record and tearing down his enemies. But what were dubbed “alternative facts” in his first term have quickly become a whole alternative reality in his second to lay the groundwork for radical change as he moves to aggressively reshape America and the world.
If the U.S. Agency for International Development is stupid enough to send prophylactics to a Palestinian terrorist group in the Gaza Strip, he claims, then it deserves to be dismantled. If recruiting people other than white men to work in the airline sector compromises safety, such programs should be eliminated. If China controls the strategic passage through the continent, the United States should take it back. If Ukraine is the aggressor, it should make concessions to Russia.
“One of the biggest presidential powers that Trump has deployed is the ability to shape his own narrative,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a Princeton history professor and editor of a book of essays about Trump’s first term. “We have seen repeatedly how President Trump creates his own reality to legitimate his actions and simultaneously discredit warnings about his decisions.”
Trump’s aides have long recognized his penchant for prevarication and either adjusted or eventually broke with him. John Kelly, his longest-serving White House chief of staff in his first term, has said that Trump would tell his press aides to publicly repeat something that he had just made up. When Kelly would object, saying, “But that’s not true,” Trump would say, “But it sounds good.”
The exaggerations and falsehoods serve a strategic purpose. While Trump won a clean victory in November, including in the popular vote, which he lost in 2016, he did not win a majority, and his 1.5-percentage-point margin was one of the lowest since the 19th century. But he regularly says that he won a “landslide victory,” which serves not just to stroke his ego but to assert an expansive popular mandate for his agenda.
Trump, who repeatedly disparaged media fact-checking during last year’s campaign, does not back off after misleading statements and lies are exposed. Instead, he tends to double down, repeating them even after it’s been reported that they are not true.
After reporters determined that the $50 million for condoms story was untrue, Trump not only repeated it, he increased the supposed total to $100 million. Nor did he back down after falsely claiming that USAID had provided grants to media organizations as “a ‘payoff’ for creating good stories about the Democrats,” even after learning that the money was simply for subscriptions.
Likewise, Trump made his claim about diversity programs and air safety the day after the midair collision of a passenger jet and Army helicopter in Washington without an ounce of proof, nor did he ever follow up with any. And while a Hong Kong company operates two of five ports adjacent to the Panama Canal, he continues to say the passage is controlled by China when in fact Panama operates it.
Trump’s blame-the-victim revisionism over Ukraine in recent days has been among the most striking efforts to translate his alternative reality into policy. Over the course of several recent days, he said that Ukraine “started” the war with Russia in 2022 and called the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a “dictator without elections,” while absolving President Vladimir Putin of Russia, an actual dictator who had invaded his neighbor. He went even further Friday, saying, “It’s not Russia’s fault.”
By undercutting public sympathy for Ukraine, Trump may make it easier for him to strike a peace agreement with Putin giving Russia much of what it wants even over any objections by Zelenskyy or European leaders. Since Zelenskyy is a dictator responsible for the war, this reasoning goes, he deserves less consideration.
One of Trump’s claims about Ukraine offers a case study in his mythmaking. He said that the United States has provided $350 billion in aid to Ukraine, three times as much as Europe, but that much of the money is “missing” and that Zelenskyy “admits that half of the money we sent him is missing.”
In fact, the United States has allocated about a third of what Trump claimed, even less than Europe, and none of it is known to be missing.
The dollar figures cited for U.S. aid to Ukraine can vary depending on how government officials present them, what time period they cover and whether they include humanitarian and economic assistance.
How did Trump arrive at his claim? The White House did not respond to a request for elaboration. But it appears that Trump was referring to a recent interview with Zelenskyy that the president or his staff either misunderstood or distorted.
In the interview, Zelenskyy was asked by The Associated Press about exaggerated numbers and he corrected them. “When it’s said that Ukraine received $200 billion to support the army during the war, that’s not true,” Zelenskyy said according to a translation by Ukrainska Pravda, a Ukrainian news outlet. “I don’t know where all that money went.”
Zelenskyy was not saying that there was $200 billion and that he did not know where all of it went. He was saying there never was $200 billion in the first place. Even Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, has indicated no concern over missing money, saying that “we have a pretty good accounting of where it’s going.” Indeed, the vast bulk of U.S. aid approved for Ukraine has been in the form of weapons, not cash.
But that does not comport with the official line at the White House. Once Trump makes an assertion, those who work for him — and want to keep working for him — are compelled to tailor their own versions of reality to match his. Even if it requires them to abandon previous understandings of the facts.
So there was former Rep. Michael Waltz, R-Fla., now Trump’s national security adviser, pressed last week to reconcile his past comments about who was responsible for the war in Ukraine with his boss’s current position.
A reporter read aloud from an opinion column that Waltz had written in 2023 stating that “Putin is to blame, certainly, like al Qaeda was to blame for 9/11.” Waltz was asked if he still believed that or whether he now shared Trump’s assessment that Ukraine had started the war.
“Well,” Waltz said carefully, “it shouldn’t surprise you that I share the president’s assessment on all kinds of issues. What I wrote as a member of Congress was as a former member of Congress.”
And so, Waltz’s actual reality gave way to Trump’s alternative version.
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