(CNN) -
Trying to pick up the most notable lies from Donald Trump's presidency is like trying to pick up the most prominent bits of trash from the city dump.
There is so much dirt to examine before a decision can be made.
But I am qualified for dirty work.
In fact, I verified every word spoken by this president from the day of his inauguration in January 2017 to September 2020, when the daily number of lies became so unmanageable that I had to start to ignore some of his comments to preserve my health.
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Will Trump be rated the worst president in US history?
Trump got even worse after November 3.
Since then, he has spent the last months of what has been a wildly dishonest presidency on a relentless and dangerous spree of lies about the elections he lost.
As the country grapples with the deadly consequences of this deception, I have selected the 15 Trump lies that in my opinion stand out from his four years in power, because of their importance, because of their atrocity, because of their absurdity or because of what they say about him. man.
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The most forceful lie: it did not rain on his inauguration
Trump began his presidency by lying about the climate.
It rained during Trump's inauguration speech.
Then, at a celebratory dance later that day, Trump told the crowd that the rain "just never came" until he finished speaking and walked in, at which point it "poured."
This was the first lie of the Trump presidency.
Like his lies that same week about the swearing-in crowd, it hinted at what would come next.
The president said that the things that we could see with our own eyes were not true.
And he often blatantly lied for no apparent strategic reason.
The most dangerous lie: the coronavirus was under control
Trump speaks at the beginning of a conference with members of the coronavirus task force on February 26, 2020 in Washington.
Trump updated the American people on what his administration's 'whole government' response is to the global coronavirus outbreak.
This was more like a family of lies than a single lie.
But each one - the lie that the virus was equivalent to the flu;
the lie that the situation was "totally under control";
the lie that the virus was "disappearing" - suggested to Americans that they did not have to change much about their usual behavior.
One year after the crisis, more than 386,000 Americans have died from causes attributed to the virus.
We cannot say precisely how the crisis would have played out differently if Trump had been more sincere.
But it is reasonable to guess that his dishonesty caused a significant number of deaths.
The most alarming saga of lies: Sharpiegate
Trump references a map held by Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan while speaking to reporters about Hurricane Dorian in the Oval Office of the White House on September 4, 2019 in Washington.
Trump tweeted in 2019 that Alabama was one of the states with the highest risk of Hurricane Dorian than had been initially predicted.
The federal meteorological office in Birmingham later tweeted that Alabama would not actually be affected by the storm.
It's not great, but it can be fixed quickly with a simple correction from the White House.
Trump, however, is so congenitally reluctant to admit the mistake that he embarked on an increasingly ridiculous campaign to prove his incorrect Alabama tweet was actually correct, eventually showing a hurricane map that was crudely altered with a Sharpie. .
The clowning could have been amusing if White House officials hadn't moved behind the scenes to try to pressure federal weather experts to say he was right and they were wrong.
The saga proved that Trump was not a lone liar: he was backed by an entire powerful apparatus willing to fight for his inventions.
The most ridiculous subject of a lie: the Boy Scouts
When I emailed the Boy Scouts of America in 2017 about Trump's claim that "the head of the Boy Scouts" had called him to tell them that his strangely political speech at the National Jamboree of Scouts was "the best speech that it has ever been done to them ”, I didn't expect an answer.
One of the hardest things to verify Trump's facts was that many of the people he lied about didn't think they were interested in being quoted in public contradicting a vindictive president.
The Boy Scouts did.
A high-level source in the Scouts - a phrase I never intended to write as a political reporter in Washington - confirmed that there was never a call.
Yes, the president of the United States lied about the Boy Scouts.
MORE: ANALYSIS |
What we learned from the impeachment vote in the House of Representatives
The ugliest defamatory lie: Rep. Ilhan Omar supports al Qaeda
At a White House event in 2019, Trump grossly distorted a 2013 quote by Rep. Ilhan Omar to try to make her supporters believe that the Minnesota Democrat had voiced her support for the terror group Al Qaeda.
Trump continued to launch additional bigoted attacks on Omar in the months that followed.
But it is difficult to imagine a more vile lie that the president tells about a Muslim official - who has already received death threats - than a smear that makes him look pro-terrorist.
The most boring serial lie: The trade deficit with China used to be $ 500 billion
US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping leave a business leaders event at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on November 9, 2017.
Trump, an unrepentant exaggerator, rarely chose to use an exact number when he could use an inaccurate larger number instead.
He then said more than 100 times that, before his presidency, the United States had for years an annual trade deficit of $ 500 billion with China, although the real deficit before Trump never reached $ 400 billion.
Trump versioned the "$ 500 billion" claim so many times that it became almost physically painful for me to double-check.
The most entertaining lie: the burly men who cry and who have never cried before
They were almost always men.
They were almost always large.
They were almost always workers.
And, according to the president, they continued to approach him shedding tears of gratitude, even though they hadn't cried before in years.
Trump's series of Tears Stories, sometimes dubbed "Sir" Stories, helped me understand his lies as a kind of stage art.
The stories were strangely great, like something you'd hear from a small-time foreign strongman.
They were also pure nonsense.
Trump was like a comedian on tour, refining and reusing his favorite parts of dishonesty until they stopped working for him.
The most traditional big lie: Trump didn't know about Stormy Daniels' payment
We have established that Trump was not the traditional lying politician.
One of his distinguishing features is that he lied mindlessly, feigning trivial topics for trivial reasons.
But he also lied when he needed to.
When he told reporters on Air Force One in 2018 that he did not know about a $ 130,000 payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels and that he did not know where his then-attorney Michael Cohen obtained the money for the payment, he was bold: Trump knew this, because he had personally reimbursed Cohen, and it was conventional: the president was lying to try to get out of a scandal in bad taste.
MORE: Trump's most controversial moments in a presidency that will be hard to forget
Biggest lie of omission: Trump ended family separation
Much of Trump's lies were clumsy, half-baked.
Something was almost an art.
Here's what he told NBC's Chuck Todd in 2019 about his widely controversial policy of separating migrant parents from their children at the border: “You know, under President Obama you had the separation.
I was the one who finished it.
Yes, Trump signed a decree in 2018 to end the family separation policy.
What he didn't mention to Todd is that what he had ended was his own policy, a plan announced by his own attorney general that had made family separation standard rather than occasional, as it had been under Obama.
All of Trump's words in those two sentences to Todd were accurate in themselves.
But he was lying because of what he left out.
Most Brazen Campaign Lie: Biden Will Destroy Pre-existing Condition Protections
Trump's reelection campaign was consistently and knowingly dishonest, especially in its attempts to portray Joe Biden as a terrifying radical.
When Trump claimed in September that Biden would destroy protections for people with pre-existing health conditions - although the Obama-Biden administration created the protections, although the protections were overwhelmingly popular, although Biden was trying to preserve them, and although Trump himself repeatedly tried to weaken them - Trump was not only lying, he was turning reality upside down.
The Lie He Fled From: Got Veterans Choice
Trump could have told a perfectly good factual story about the Veterans Choice healthcare program that Obama signed into law in 2014 - it wasn't good enough, so he replaced it with a more expansive program that he signed into law in 2018.
That's not the story he told - whether out of political ignorance, a desire to erase Obama's legacy, or simply because he's a liar - instead, he claimed over and over again, more than 160 times before he lost count, that he was the one who got the Veterans Choice program passed after years of other presidents tried and failed.
And why not stretch it out?
He knew he probably wouldn't be challenged by a body of press drowned in another Trump drama.
It wasn't until August 2020 that he was asked about the lie on his face.
He quickly left the room.
Crazy Uncle's Lie Award: Windmill Noise Causes Cancer
Trump gestures while speaking during the NBC News forum moderated by Savannah Guthrie at the Perez Art Museum in Miami on October 15, 2020.
It was a problem for the country that the president was not only a conspiracy theorist, but was steeped in conspiracy culture, regularly stumbling across ridiculous claims and then sharing them as fact.
For such a fierce critic of the use of anonymous sources by the media, Trump surely liked to use many anonymous sources.
His stories were full of nonsense that he attributed to "people" or said "they" say.
One of the crazier elements was his 2019 statement that they "say" that windmill noise "causes cancer."
After Trump amplified another conspiracy lie in 2020, NBC's Savannah Guthrie admonished him saying that "you're not like someone's crazy uncle who can just retweet anything."
Except that he did, until Twitter sanctioned his account.
The most plotting lie: that plan would arrive in two weeks
Trump's great health plan would come forever in "two weeks."
So were other plans and announcements.
Trump is, in essence, a street vendor.
Every moment of his presidency was an opportunity for him to sell someone something, whether that something really existed or not.
And if they asked when they could actually see the magic elixir that he claimed was being brewed right behind the curtain, he would have to delay them until they forgot about it.
My personal favorite lie: Trump was once named Michigan's Man of the Year
Trump has never lived in Michigan.
Why would he have been named Michigan Man of the Year years before his presidency?
It wouldn't have been.
It was not.
And yet this lie that he seemed to have made up in the final week of his 2016 campaign became a staple of his 2020 campaign, repeated at Michigan rally after rally.
It is very illustrative because it makes very little sense.
The most depressing lie: Trump won the election
Trump's long campaign in the White House against verifiable reality has culminated in his lie that he is the true winner of the 2020 presidential election that he clearly, certifiably and fairly lost.
For many of us, this is ridiculous nonsense.
But for millions of deluded Americans, it's the truth.
And now people have died.
The nation's truthfulness issue is clearly not just a Trump issue.
With this latest storm of deception and the insurrection on Capitol Hill that he fostered, Trump has shown us, once again, how distant much of his political base has become, or always was.
Donald trump