JD Vance held court on CNN's State of the Union program. "The American media completely ignored this stuff," he lamented last Sunday, "until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes."
But it wasn't just a meme, protested interviewer Dana Bash. The Republican vice presidential candidate gave a telling answer: "If I have to create stories so that the American media will actually pay attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do, Dana, because you're giving Kamala Harris complete freedom."
Related: 'Racism is embedded in our society': How attacks on immigrants in Ohio highlight America's disinformation crisis
If ever there was a case of saying the quiet part out loud, Vance had perfected the art. The cat memes he referenced were inspired by unsubstantiated rumors about legal Haitian immigrants in his home state of Ohio eating pets - rumors that led to bomb threats and evacuations of schools and government buildings in Springfield.
But Vance's willingness to "create stories" to grab attention before the November election signaled a new era in post-truth America, where a lie is no longer slyly spread but brazenly displayed as a tactic to gain political support and sow social chaos.
Some commentators have drawn a parallel with the way Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway concocted "alternative facts" when she tried to defend then-White House spokesman Sean Spicer's false claims about the size of the crowd at Trump's inauguration on another Sunday political program in 2017.
Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: "It's a logical extension of what was once called 'alternative facts' by the same camp. It's clear that this is a long-term mission, more than just a passing remark.
"Their whole strategy is to say anything, make up anything, spin false stories to distract from the very real consequences of their radical and extreme agenda that is so far outside the mainstream of the interests of the American people. They think they have a better chance of winning by spinning crazy stories about people eating pets than by having another conversation about the consequences of their policy agenda."
Dishonesty in politics is nothing new, from President Richard Nixon's cover-up of the Watergate scandal to the false claim of weapons of mass destruction used as a pretext for the Iraq war. In 2004, the New York Times Magazine quoted an unnamed official in the George W. Bush administration as saying, "We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."
It was fertile ground for Trump, who had spent years exaggerating his personal wealth and charitable giving, misleading the public about ventures like Trump University and even misrepresenting his own height and weight. Beginning in 2011, he was a leading promoter of the false conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore ineligible to be president of the United States.
Since his inauguration, Trump has made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims during his four years in the White House, according to a Washington Post count. He memorably claimed to have presided over the largest tax cut ever - Ronald Reagan's was even larger - and repeatedly downplayed the coronavirus pandemic, telling the public it would soon "go away."
But perhaps the biggest lie of all came on the night of the 2020 presidential election, when Trump claimed he had won. He stuck to this position, claiming it had been "stolen" from him through widespread voter fraud, ultimately leading to a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. He has since branded the rioters as martyrs and "patriots."
Now, as he makes his third consecutive attempt at the White House, Trump's mendacity, if possible, has been stepped up a notch. He made more than 30 false claims during the presidential debate against Joe Biden in Atlanta, according to a fact-check by host network CNN, but escaped scrutiny because of Biden's lackluster performance.
In the debate against Harris in Philadelphia, he made false claims about topics including inflation, immigration, tariffs, the role of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on January 6, Joe Biden's role in the criminal cases against him, and popular support for abolishing the constitutional right to abortion.
Amazingly, he also plucked the racist Springfield conspiracy theory from the fever swamps of the Internet and gave it a national platform to tens of millions of viewers when he said, "In Springfield, they eat the dogs. The people who came in, they eat the cats. They eat the pets of the people who live there."
Not for the first time that night, ABC News moderators were forced to intervene with a fact check. There is no evidence to support such a claim. The Wall Street Journal reported that on the day Vance first spread the right-wing rumors, the city manager of Springfield told his office they were unfounded.
Vance's team gave the Journal a police report in which a resident alleged that her cat may have been stolen by Haitian neighbors. But a Journal reporter tracked down the resident and discovered that her cat had been in the basement the entire time, prompting her to apologize to her neighbors.
Yet Trump and Vance continued to tell the lies they knew how to tell, at campaign rally after campaign rally, undeterred by warnings from the White House that they could provoke an ugly backlash against Haitians in Springfield. Then came Vance's shocking admission that he would make things up and be proud of it.
Days after the CNN interview, Vance continued to defend the comments, while admitting that he had not fact-checked residents' claims about the pets. "The media has a responsibility to fact-check," he said at a rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in an attempt to deflect blame.
Charlie Sykes, a conservative writer and broadcaster, said: "What JD Vance is saying is that the facts don't matter and I have no shame whatsoever in having spread a false story.
"It underscores the extent to which Trump and Vance and the Maga movement are addicted to these fake online internet memes and are unwaveringly attached to these memes. Even when they're disproven, they're still going to stick with them, which is dangerous because it means that no matter how much evidence you can produce, no matter how dangerous the lies turn out to be, they're not going to back down."
Sykes warned: "They're going to keep pushing. Extrapolate this to what happens in November and the election results. Extrapolate it to anything."
On Saturday, Vance will perform alongside conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson during the former Fox News host's live tour in Hershey, Pennsylvania, despite the fact that Carlson recently hosted Nazi apologist and Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper on his podcast, a decision roundly condemned by Jewish members of Congress.
Meanwhile, Trump has been joined on the campaign trail by far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who appeared at the debate and a day later in New York to commemorate the 23rd anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Loomer, who has 1.2 million followers on the social media platform X, has previously suggested that 9/11 was an inside job. At a rally in Las Vegas, Trump said he heard Harris had used a secret earpiece during their debate, a baseless conspiracy theory that Loomer has promoted on X.
Loomer also posted on X that if Harris, who is of Indian descent, wins the election, "the White House will smell like curry and speeches in the White House will be routed through a call center." Even far-right Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene condemned the comment as racist.
Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, sees Loomer as a symptom rather than a cause. "Go through a list of all the conspiracy theories that Donald Trump has embraced or pushed and it's a long one," he said. "It's not like Laura Loomer is making Donald Trump out to be a conspiracy theorist. Donald Trump has been one for years. He's now finding people who will feed and validate his dark impulses."
There's another reason for Trump and Vance's sense of impunity. Their lies are borne out of, and legitimized by, a right-wing media ecosystem that now includes X, formerly Twitter, owned by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who has endorsed Trump, interviewed him, and sought to portray his critics as enemies of free speech.
Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at the watchdog Media Matters for America, said: "This is a right-wing media ticket. Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are both people who are completely immersed in the information ecosystem of the far right, and they have adopted this complete lack of standards and a willingness to use any means necessary to achieve their goals of political gain and political victory. What we are seeing here is how these lies can spiral completely out of control. Springfield, Ohio, is experiencing real chaos right now."
As he heads into a home stretch of elections that could see him face jail time if he loses, Trump is outdoing himself with a flurry of lies. On Thursday, CNN fact-checkers produced a list of "12 completely fictional stories" he's told in the past month, including Harris reinstating the military draft, schools sending children for gender confirmation surgeries without their parents' knowledge and Harris negotiating with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2022 to try to prevent the invasion of Ukraine.
Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said: "There is nothing worse than a desperate man. There is nothing worse than a desperate racist man who can't control the woman in front of him who happens to be African-American. He can't control the circumstances around him that have changed - the intensification of the political race for the presidency.
"Can't control what people are saying about him, the fact that Republicans are now coming out and speaking out against a second Trump term and creating spaces where we're willing to support the Democrat over Donald Trump because he's so evil and so dangerous. If he can't control that, he's going to be even more dangerous and more desperate and you have to be aware of that because there's more of this stuff coming between now and November. "
