The Liar’s Club: How Trump turned Washington into an open-mic night for delusion

There was a time – long, long ago, in the distant era of 2016 – when a political lie still required some craftsmanship. You had to thread it carefully, polish it, rehearse it in the mirror, maybe even run it past a staffer with a worried expression. Back then, lying took effort.

Enter Donald Trump, a man who treats lying the way Picasso treated colours: freely, passionately, and with reckless disregard for proportion. And now, in his second term, the man’s ability to create alternate universes on demand has gone from performance art to a governing strategy.

But what’s most impressive – truly awe-inspiring – is not the breadth of his lies, nor the speed at which he produces them. It’s how contagious they’ve become.

It turns out lying is like yawning: once one person does it, everyone in the room feels strangely compelled to join in.

Take Karoline Leavitt, the White House Press Secretary who speaks with the confidence of someone who believes Google fact-checkers have all been killed in a tragic server fire. She strides into the briefing room, flips open her binder (presumably blank), and proceeds to deliver statements so disconnected from reality they should come with an opt-out button for hallucinations.

And then there’s Speaker Mike Johnson, a man so committed to Trump’s narrative that he now appears to be running the House of Representatives from inside a snow globe. No matter what happens – election results, government shutdown, court rulings, live video evidence – Johnson peers out from his glass dome and declares, “Actually, that didn’t happen. But if it did, it’s the Democrat’s fault… so it must have happened.” At this point, he’s less Speaker of the House and more Narrator of a Children’s Fantasy Audiobook No One Asked For.

The trio together have turned Washington into a surreal improv troupe, testing the limits of how much nonsense a democracy can absorb before it starts blinking in Morse code for help.

Trump sets the tone, of course. One day he insists he won an election he very publicly lost. The next, he’s claiming he invented a popular policy, a holiday, or sometimes a country. (Fun fact: according to Trump, Slovenia might not exist. Melania declined to comment.)

Leavitt then takes to the podium to offer “clarifications,” which is generous terminology for whatever it is she’s doing. Her approach to questions is revolutionary: she doesn’t answer them. She simply replaces them with entirely new questions, then answers those instead. It’s like watching a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat, except the rabbit is a lie and the hat is also a lie.

Meanwhile, Mike Johnson nods along like a man who has been hypnotised by a pocket watch shaped like Trump’s toupée.

What makes this moment so absurd – and so dangerous – is how normalised the dishonesty has become. It’s not just that lies are being told; it’s that they’re being told with the confidence of people who know there will be no consequences whatsoever.

At this point, fact-checkers should unionise, if only for the hazard pay.

Of course, the real victims here are Americans (and the rest of us, who have to watch like horrified neighbours peering over the fence). Watching Trump’s team lie repeatedly, brazenly, and in unison is like watching a slow-motion car crash caused by someone insisting the brake pedal is a hoax.

But maybe there’s a silver lining. With so many lies told so frequently, people might finally reach saturation. There are only so many alternate realities a society can juggle before someone trips over the multiverse.

Until then, the Liar’s Club meets daily: Trump presiding as founder and keynote delusionist, Leavitt working the room, and Johnson nodding piously as he prepares his next imaginative reinterpretation of plain, observable events.

Welcome to Washington, where the truth isn’t just optional – it’s actively discouraged.

Update: What extraordinary timing. Moments away from publishing this article, along comes this piece of news with proof that karma is still a thing:

Here is a close-up of the questions:

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