Donald Trump Is Lyin’ Up a Storm

As is so often the case, Mr. Trump is not letting reality interfere with his performance.

At a rally in Nevada this weekend, Donald Trump told the crowd that Californians were rioting to «get out of their sanctuary cities». (They aren’t.) He also suggested that Democrats will soon be looking to hand out free luxury cars to illegal immigrants. (They won’t.) «Give ’em a driver’s license. Next thing you know, they’ll want to buy ’em a car», he riffed. «Then they’ll say the car’s not good enough, we want — how about a Rolls-Royce?».

Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed has been electrifying as well, full of statements intended to thrill his fans — and, better still, bait his opponents into a partisan rage. In recent days, he has dubbed Stormy Daniels «Horseface», escalated his taunting of Senator Elizabeth Warren as «Pocahontas» and grumbled about the fact that Bruce Ohr, one of Mr. Trump’s nemeses in the «rigged» Russian «witch hunt», is still employed by the Department of Justice. He has asserted that the Democratic nominee for governor in Florida, Andrew Gillum, is looking to turn the state into «the next Venezuela». He has threatened to dispatch troops to shut down the southern border and renewed his vow to cut off the «massive foreign aid» sent to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras for those nations’ failure to stop their people from flocking to the United States.

In particular, the caravan of Honduran migrants making its way north has emerged as a focus of his fantasies. Mr. Trump has repeatedly implied that Democrats are paying Honduran youth to join the caravan. On Monday, he claimed, based on nothing, that the caravan is awash in «criminals and unknown Middle Easterners».

On Sunday, news broke of yet another move by the Trump administration to assault LGBTQ rights. According to a draft memo leaked to The Times, the Department of Health and Human Services is leading the charge to establish a legal definition of «sex» based strictly on «immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth», eliminating the category of transgender individuals in the eyes of the federal government. In cases when a person’s birth sex was in dispute, genetic testing would be used to settle the matter.