The short answer is yes! If you live in the United States of America, you have a constitutional right to tell lies. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” The vast majority of lies told by Americans are “constitutionally protected speech.”
One exception is fraud, which means “false representations, dishonesty, and deceit." For legal purposes, fraud is the “intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value.” You don’t have a right to lie to convince someone to give you money for some fictitious or false purpose or reason. However, fraud is pretty difficult to prove and a lot of people get away with it.
Another exception is perjury. The legal definition of perjury is “the voluntary violation of an oath or vow… by swearing to what is untrue.” You can avoid committing perjury by not testifying in court. The Fifth Amendment gives you the right to refuse to answer questions, make statements, or testify in a criminal trial if doing so would force you to lie to protect yourself from legal penalties for lying. If you commit fraud and get caught, you can always “plead the fifth.”
Another exception is telling lies that put other people in danger. However, you can get away with yelling “fire” in a crowded theater if you can convince a jury that you thought there actually was a fire. You can also tell lies that incite others to break the law as long as your lies are not “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action [or] likely to incite or produce such action” [Brandenberg v. Ohio].
In other words, it’s okay to tell lies that encourage a political insurrection as long as your lies are not intended to produce an “imminent” insurrection and are unlikely to incite or result in an insurrection. However, lies intended to ignite an insurrection and actually result in an insurrection are not protected by the First Amendment—unless the current Supreme Court decides to rule otherwise.
Since Americans have a constitutional right to lie, we have to trust each other to tell the truth. The Ten Commandments of Judaism and Christianity include: “Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor,” meaning don’t tell lies that hurt other people. Islam also considers lying to be a sin that reflects a lack of belief in Allah. Regardless of religion or belief systems, we trust decent, moral people to tell the truth, even though they have a constitutional right to lie.
We know that even good, decent people shade the truth a bit now and then, and we likely do so ourselves without thinking. We don’t end friendships because of little white lies but we avoid having friends who are habitual liars. We expect advertisers to be less than completely truthful in hyping their products. However, we don’t expect businesses to lie about how much of what is in their products or to tell us something is safe when they know it is not.
We also expect politicians to embellish their resumes, claim more credit for accomplishments than they deserve, and make promises they know they may not be able to keep. But we don’t expect politicians to tell outright lies about their qualifications to hold office, claim credit for accomplishments that didn’t happen, and make promises that they have no intention of even trying to keep. We expect politicians to be decent, moral people, even if they aren’t completely straightforward or truthful.
However, we are in the final days of a presidential campaign that has been dominated by continual, intentional, purposeful lying. The Harris campaign, and Biden campaign before it, has included the usual embellishments, excessive claims of credit, and unrealistic promises that characterize most if not all political campaigns. However, the entire Trump campaign has been based on false statements that are not supported by statistical evidence, professional opinions, or any other objective assessment of reality or truth. These “alternative facts” are not the usual political hyperbole, but a barrage of outright lies.
Trump says that today’s U.S. economy is one of the worst economies in the history of the nation and is on the verge of collapse. However, the major economic indicators show that the economy has made a strong recovery since the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. Inflation and unemployment are back down to pre-pandemic levels, the stock market is at record levels, interest rates are going down, and economic growth is strong and steady. Harris has not claimed undue credit for these impressive economic accomplishments but has promised to expand them to build an “opportunity economy.”
Trump also claims that when he was President the U.S. economy was one of the strongest of any in American history. During the first three years of the Trump administration, unemployment was at near-record lows and median incomes made strong gains. However, “growth in gross domestic product was well below what previous presidents achieved, and other metrics such as wages and business investment ranged from decent to mediocre.” The fourth year of the Trump presidency was an economic disaster that more than wiped out the gains of the three previous years. The COVID pandemic was not Trump’s fault, but there is no indication that he did a good job of coping with it. Biden did what he needed to do to support an economic recovery and it worked.
Trump blames Harris for the surge in undocumented immigrants. However, the Supreme Court has ruled that “Congress has the power to make rules for admitting and excluding aliens, and to establish a uniform rule of naturalization.” The President is responsible for enforcing the laws enacted by Congress. When Congress failed to act, at Trump’s bidding, Biden resorted to an “executive action” as a temporary fix for a problem that ultimately must be addressed by Congress. Regardless, Kamala Harris has not been responsible for border security but promises to continue to work toward legislation for a permanent solution.
Trump also claims that immigrants account for a surge in violent crimes and increased domestic unemployment. However, crime statistics indicate that undocumented immigrants are no more likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens and that violent crime in the U.S. has decreased, rather than increased, under the Biden administration. In addition, there is no indication that undocumented immigrants increase unemployment rates but generally have higher employment rates than other workers, which contributes positively to the economy.
Lies about the economy and border security are but parts of a campaign that is built almost entirely on lies. In Trump’s press conference in August 2024, NPR reviewers and reporters documented 162 lies and distortions in facts in his hour-long rambling presentation. According to CNN, Trump made more than 30 false claims in his September debate with Harris. The Trump campaign is currently spreading blatant lies about the federal emergency response and assistance for victims of hurricanes Helene and Milton.
The biggest lie of all, that Donald Trump tells over and over, is that he didn’t actually lose the 2020 presidential election because the election was somehow rigged against him. There is no credible evidence to support this claim but compelling legal and official evidence to refute it. The litmus test for loyalty to Trump’s Republican party is to affirm, or at least not deny, the big lie that Trump won the 2020 presidential election.
There have been some questionable presidential campaigns in the past, but there is never been a political campaign in the U.S. in the modern history that was based so completely upon lies. However, there was a political campaign in Germany during the 1930s that employed a very similar strategy.
The U.S. Office of Strategic Services described Adolph Hitler’s strategy for gaining political power in Germany. “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.” Sound familiar?
In his autobiography Mein Kampf, or “My Struggle,” Adolf Hitler wrote that people were more likely to believe a giant lie than a little one because they were willing to tell small lies in their own lives but “would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.” Since they wouldn’t tell such “colossal untruths…they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” Trump’s supporters apparently cannot believe he would lie about something so colossal as winning the 2020 election so they tend to believe what he says about everything.
I was born in 1939, and my earliest memories are of World War II and the events leading up to its end. I have thought a lot about the war since but could never understand how Hitler could convince a highly intelligent and educated society to carry out his brutal conquests to cleanse the nation of “racially inferior” people and restore Germany to the greatness of the German Empire of the early 1900s. Now I know how he did it. He used lies to convince the people that he could make Germany great again. Sound familiar?
As I have written before, I believe the vast majority of Trump supporters are caring, intelligent, educated people, like most Germans in the 1930s. If I believed everything that Trump says I would probably have voted for him. But I don’t and I didn’t. I don’t expect to change anyone’s mind or vote by what I have written here. However, if Donald Trump is elected President, Americans need to be prepared for what is likely to follow. The constitutional right to lie may well lead to the end of constitutional government.
John Ikerd
https://open.substack.com/.../heathercox.../p/october-6-2024?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
https://www.cnn.com/.../us-economy-trump-vs-other.../
https://www.politifact.com/.../no-donald-trump-didnt.../
https://www.npr.org/.../nx-s1-5070566/trump-news-conference
https://www.cnn.com/.../fact-check-debate.../index.html
Quoted from “Joseph Goebbels: On the ‘Big Lie,’” Jewish Virtual Library, https://bit.ly/2PlQmdI
Office of Strategic Services, A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler: His Life and Legend, Walter C. Langer, Washington, D.C., August 24, 1999, p.38. https://www.cia.gov/.../CIA-RDP78-02646R000600240001-5.pdf