CNN
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Donald Trump is deploying his trademark political gambit in a vicious electoral endgame.

In a wave of disinformation that distorts the facts, the former president is accusing Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden's White House of the very violations he is accused of.

With Hurricane Helene and another storm on the way, Trump falsely claims the White House is diverting disaster relief to unrelated refugee programs. This is false, but as president, Trump reallocated FEMA funds to finance his harsh immigration policies.

The Republican candidate often insists that his legal troubles are evidence of Democratic election interference. But he is the one who tried to subvert the will of voters in 2020 – the most blatant attempt to overturn an election in American history.

Trump also accuses the Biden administration of using the judiciary as a weapon against him. But in 2020, the then-president launched a late-night Twitter tirade in which he called for the jailing of his political enemies, warned that Biden should not run for president and asked, “Where are all the arrests?”

Given his attempt to suppress democracy and steal Biden's victory four years ago, it was an asset for the ex-president to warn Sunday in Wisconsin that if he doesn't win in November, “some people say it will.” There will never be a choice again.”

On Monday, the ex-president – whose administration was famous for “alternative facts” and who told thousands of documented lies during his time in office – made one of his boldest complaints yet about his Democratic opponent on Hugh Hewitt's radio show, saying of Harris “Everything , what she says is a lie, you know, a total lie.”

It's not exactly news that Trump often has a distant relationship with facts. And many politicians lie – an industry of fact-checkers is proof of it. Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, for example, faced questionable statements about his military career and whether he was in Hong Kong during the crackdown on China's Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. And the Minnesota governor made false claims as recently as Sunday about the former president's stance on abortion and the economy when he left office in January 2021.

But no modern politician has built a presidency on such outrageous falsehoods as Trump. And the ex-president has never really hidden what he was up to. In one of the most telling moments of his political career, before the 2018 Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City, the 45th president told his supporters that he was their only reliable source of reality. “Stay with us. “Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news,” Trump said. “What you see and read is not what is happening.”

And the name of the former president's social media network, Truth Social, is a deliberate attempt to rebrand untruth as fact.

As the election approaches, the Republican nominee has unleashed a torrent of disinformation remarkable even by his own standards.

For example, in one of the most extraordinary moments in the history of presidential debates, he falsely insisted that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were “eating dogs.” The people who came in. They eat the cats…they eat the pets of the people who live there.”

Trump's running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, later appeared to justify the former president's falsehoods that he had previously amplified in an appearance on CNN's “State of the Union” last month. “If I have to make up stories so that the American media will actually pay attention to the suffering of the American people, then I will do that,” Vance told Dana Bash.

In the event of a disaster, false information can have dangerous consequences – a risk that Trump appears willing to take.

The ex-president made several false statements about the Biden administration's response to the hurricane, including the baseless argument that Democrats ignored casualties in Republican areas in North Carolina and that Biden did not respond to calls from the Republican governor of Georgia.

He has also claimed that while the federal government is sending billions of dollars abroad, it is only offering $750 to Americans who lost their homes in Hurricane Helene. FEMA has explained that $750 is simply an immediate advance payment that survivors can receive to cover basic needs such as food, water, baby formula and emergency supplies. People can apply for other assistance, such as home repairs worth up to $42,500.

Harris on Monday accused the former president of spreading “a lot of misinformation” about the help available to Helene survivors. “It's extraordinarily irresponsible, it's about him, not you,” she said.

So why does Trump traffic in such easily debunked falsehoods?

Part of this is typical of a character defined by boastfulness and disregard for rules that apply to other people. Trump made a name for himself as a bluffing real estate shark who traded in exaggerations and, in a life spent in the New York tabloids of the 1980s, discovered that the bigger the untruth, the harder it is to dismiss.

But his manipulation of the truth took an even more sinister form when he entered politics. In his first hours in office, Trump's absurd claims about the size of the crowd at his inauguration were widely ridiculed. But in retrospect, the charade with his first White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, was a harbinger of an administration that rejected facts as an instrument of political power. The seeds of deception sown in January 2017 blossomed during the Covid-19 pandemic into a disinformation offensive apparently aimed at covering up Trump's leadership failures. They also gave a taste of the outright lies he would spread after losing the 2020 election to Biden.

Trump voters are responding to his populism and elite-busting, and many sincerely believe it is a response to a leftward march by the Democratic Party. Trump's “America First” foreign policy is appealing to many in a country fed up with foreign wars, and his messages on undocumented migration and the economy may shock liberals, but they are winning over millions of Americans.

Trump’s denigration of what the “establishment” sees as truth is not a mistake – it is the golden key to his appeal.

But the ex-president also understands that his portrayal of an alternative reality can act as a power multiplier and, with the help of the conservative media machine, create articles of faith that deepen his bonds with his followers.

One example is the story he tells that he was illegally forced from power after the last election. Republican politicians must accept this new orthodoxy to save their careers. In last week's vice presidential debate, for example, Vance refused to say his boss lost in 2020.

Republicans who deviate from this false reality are ostracized — like former Vice President Mike Pence, who rejected Trump's false claims that he had the constitutional authority to reverse the results of the 2020 election, and former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney , who endorsed Harris for president and campaigned with her last week.

The still-strong notion that Trump was cheated out of power four years ago has laid the groundwork for his baseless suggestions that this election will not be free and fair, and is fueling fears of another constitutional crisis in November the election could come.

What seem like obvious falsehoods can have political implications at the end of a bitter election.

Both Trump and Harris, who are deadlocked in the polls, are chasing voters who don't typically care about politics. Therefore, it is possible that a false narrative about, for example, migrants' consumption of pets reinforces pre-existing fears about immigrants. Likewise, Trump's claims that Harris is a communist, a Marxist and a fascist — while contradictory and ridiculous according to objective historical investigation — could convince some voters that she is extreme and somehow un-American. This message aligns with Trump's attempts to stigmatize Harris' racial identity after he falsely argued that she “accidentally turned black” for political expediency.

The former president's falsehoods not only serve to undermine the separation of powers that normally limits a president's power. They also interfere with the proper functioning of the American government.

Because of Trump's false claims of fraud, many citizens now have deep doubts about the integrity of the electoral system – the bedrock of democracy's central idea that voters can choose their leaders. His incessant attacks on the integrity of the justice system threaten the rule of law. Attempts to denigrate trust in political, scientific, legal and media institutions are a familiar tool of authoritarian figures Trump admires, including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who consolidated his power by discrediting his country's accountability bodies.

Shattered trust in government will make it harder for America to solve its problems, including an overwhelmed and outdated asylum system and the failings in the economy criticized by both presidential candidates. And a campaign that has ended in a torrent of false statements and vicious personal attacks suggests that his second administration is likely to be even more extreme than his first if Trump wins back the White House next month.