A CNN Fact-Checker Said There’s One Word Trump Consistently Uses When He’s Lying

Instagram Facebook Facebook Twitter Twitter Amazon TikTok TikTok Thought Catalog Diamond Mark Camera Collective World FlagLink Loading Arrow Pointing Down Skip to content After a decade of fact-checking Donald Trump, CNN senior reporter Daniel Dale has reached a blunt conclusion: there is “no public official in Washington who lies like Trump.” In a September 27 essay, Dale went further, writing that “we are witnessing a rare, very possibly once-in-a-lifetime political liar.” Across social posts and fact checks, he’s laid out exactly how he arrived there — from invented compliments to the stories that start with a stranger calling him “sir.”

Take Trump’s 2017 Boy Scout jamboree speech. After delivering a political address to children, Trump told the Wall Street Journal that the Scouts’ head had called it “the greatest speech that was ever made to them.” Dale points to that account: the Boy Scouts said the call never happened. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders later acknowledged there was no call, while saying “multiple members of the Boy Scout leadership” had offered compliments in person after the speech.

Dale says Trump’s stories about unnamed men addressing him as “sir” follow a similar pattern and are usually invented. On CNN in 2019 he put it that “almost all” such stories are false in some way, though he noted the word alone doesn’t prove a story false.

In a separate X post, Dale called Trump’s claim that prices had gone “way down” his “single most politically damaging category of lie” at the time. He said even devoted supporters could refute it “with their own eyes every day.” Federal CPI figures in Dale’s September 28, 2026 fact check show grocery prices rose 3.4% and overall consumer prices rose 4.8% from January 2025 through August 2026.

Numbers, Dale says, are a tell on their own, because Trump inflates or deflates them to fit the moment, like the “25 million” border crossings or “$21 trillion” in investment. He has been counting since September 2016, and logged more than 8,500 false claims before campaign volume forced him to stop keeping a complete tally in 2020.

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