Trump’s Most Audacious Lie Yet

When someone lies as prodigiously as Donald Trump—The Washington Post stopped counting at more than 30,000 around the time he left office—handing out superlatives is challenging. Even so, the former president might have told his most audacious lie yet this weekend.

Trump sat for a conversation with Fox and Friends Weekend that aired yesterday. This isn’t a venue where Trump would expect to get tough questions, and co-host Will Cain made a relatively straightforward point. “You famously said, regarding Hillary Clinton, ‘lock her up,’” he said. “You declined to do that as president.” The “lock her up” motif is troublesome for Trump because it undermines his new gambit that he should be immune from prosecution because he’s a politician.

“I beat her. It’s easier when you win. They all said, ‘lock her up’—and I could have done it—but I felt it would have been a terrible thing, and then this happened to me,” Trump replied. “Hillary Clinton, I didn’t say, ‘lock her up,’ but the people would all say, ‘lock her up.’”

That’s nonsense, though the assertion was so bold that it gave me pause. I spend a lot of time watching and listening to Trump, but memories are fickle. I remembered attending Trump rallies where the crowd chanted “lock her up,” and I remembered Trump did little to quell them. Was it possible he had never explicitly said the words himself?

[David Frum: An exit from the GOP’s labyrinth of Trump lies]

But of course he did. “‘Lock her up’ is right,” he said in October 2016.  “For what she did, they should lock her up,” he said at a rally I attended in Greensboro, North Carolina, a few days later. He used other phrasings at other times. In June 2016, for example, he said, “Hillary Clinton has to go to jail. She has to go to jail,” he said, helpfully adding for the historical record: “I said that.” As he noted in the interview, he backed off the demands once he’d won. But in 2020, running for reelection, he went back to playing the hits. “You should lock her up, I’ll tell you,” he said at an Ohio rally.

His claim that he “could have” locked Clinton up is less brazen but perhaps more dangerous for its view of how the justice system works, or how Trump thinks it ought to work. Trump only faces the possibility of jail after he was indicted by a grand jury, tried in an open court, and convicted by a jury of 12 New Yorkers. Clinton, by contrast, was never charged, much less convicted by any court. A president can’t legally, and shouldn’t, be able to summarily imprison anyone without charges, including and perhaps especially a political opponent. These are the kinds of things that used to go without saying.

Speaking of things left unsaid, none of the Fox News hosts pushed Trump on the bogus claim. Whether Republicans or conservative media are willing to back his lie as he seeks a return to the White House as commander in chief, he’s already the gaslighter in chief.