President Donald Trump is a liar. I can’t stress this fact strongly enough.
If you are wondering when the president is lying, just look at his anus-shaped mouth and if it’s moving, well you have your answer.
But the president’s current lie—and possibly his longest-running lie—is bizarre even for the president.
On Thursday, Trump was trying to explain his connection to Michigan after threatening to withhold money from the swing state after falsely claiming that state officials were trying to steal the election by allowing residents to vote by mail.
Trump, who is visiting Michigan Thursday, was asked if he was worried about losing the state in the November election with his current threats especially considering residents there are currently going through a flooding emergency.
Trump replied: “No, I’m not. I’m — no, I’m not concerned at all. We’re going to help Michigan. Michigan is a great state. I’ve gotten tremendous business to go to Michigan. Michigan is one of the reasons I ran. I was honored in Michigan long before I thought about — I was honored as the Man of the Year in Michigan at a big event.”
He continued: “I remember so well.” He claimed this happened at an event about five or six years before he thought about running for president, where he gave a speech decrying the loss of Michigan’s auto business to Mexico. “And I posed many questions to Michigan that night, and I think, I think it made quite an impression,” he said, CNN reports.
There is only one problem: Michigan doesn’t have a man of the year, and if they did it would go to a Michigander not an orange walrus from New York. And CNN notes that this isn’t the first time he’s told this lie. In fact, he’s been kicking this story, or some version of the story, since 2016.
Do you know the level of commitment you have to have to carry a lie since 2016?
Well, CNN thinks it has solved the mystery. From CNN:
Journalists tried and failed to figure out what he was talking about. (For one, the state does not have an official Man of the Year award. For two, Trump had never lived in Michigan.) In an August 2019 telling, Trump himself said he had been confused about why he had supposedly gotten the award: “I said, ‘How come?’ I didn’t even understand it myself.”
Then a former Republican congressman from Michigan, Dave Trott, contacted CNN and other news outlets to solve the mystery.
Trott offered a convincing explanation: Trump was talking about his speech at an event Trott had organized, a Lincoln Day dinner for Republicans in Oakland County, Michigan, in 2013.
There, Trott said, Trump gave a “rambling” address resembling the one he says he did — and Trott gave him a framed copy of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and other gifts. But Trott did not give him any Man of the Year award, and nor did anyone else.
Trott, a two-term congressman who decided against running again in 2018 and now says Trump is “unfit for office,” told CNN last year that he was unwilling to correct the President to his face at an auto industry roundtable in 2017 where Trump appeared to thank him over the nonexistent award.
“But now that I’m out of Congress, I feel comfortable correcting the story,” Trott said in 2019.
CNN notes that this is hardly one of Trump’s most hazardous lies but it further proves the lengths this president will go to make himself beloved and adored to a country that truly doesn’t fuck with him.