It’s long been established that former President Donald Trump lies whenever he believes he can get away with it. On issues big or small, he’s been found to stretch the truth, skirt the question or outright fabricate events, as he has after the FBI retrieved a slew of classified documents from his Mar-a-Lago estate last year. It’s basically one of his defining traits at this point. And yet, somehow, seeing how shameless he can be in the face of overwhelming evidence can still be disorienting.
It’s clearly Trump’s voice on an audio recording that’s become a key piece of evidence in the federal case against him. On the tape, which NBC News obtained Tuesday, he can be heard telling attendees of a 2021 meeting at his Bedminster residence that he’s showing them a document that contains “secret information.” And after we hear the shuffling of papers, he announces that the document he is presenting is from the Defense Department and that information is “highly confidential.”
Seeing how shameless Trump can be in the face of overwhelming evidence can still be disorienting
That’s what everyone who’s listened to the now public recording can hear with their own ears. There’s no ambiguity about the conversation, which was mentioned in the indictment that laid out 37 charges against Trump. (Trump has denied all charges and pleaded not guilty in court during his arraignment.) That doesn’t mean that Trump hasn’t found a way to claim that he wasn’t really doing what he said he was doing on the recording.
In an interview with Semafor and ABC News aboard his campaign plane Tuesday, Trump said it was “bravado” that people are hearing from him on the recording. “I was talking and just holding up papers and talking about them, but I had no documents. I didn’t have any documents.”
That’s a step beyond what he told Fox News Digital during an interview earlier in the day. “I said it very clearly — I had a whole desk full of lots of papers, mostly newspaper articles, copies of magazines, copies of different plans, copies of stories, having to do with many, many subjects, and what was said was absolutely fine,” Trump said. “We did nothing wrong. This is a whole hoax.”
When Semafor and ABC News asked about those comments, Trump gave what may be his most boldfaced lie to date:
Asked about his use of the word “plans” during a Fox News interview earlier Tuesday to describe some items he may have highlighted in the 2021 meeting, Trump insisted he was referring to “building plans” and plans for golf courses strewn about his desk. “Did I use the word plans?” he said. “What I’m referring to is magazines, newspapers, plans of buildings. I had plans of buildings. You know, building plans? I had plans of a golf course.”
That’s right. He is claiming that when speaking about what was reportedly, according to NBC News, a document detailing a military plan to strike Iran, he was really just telling the meeting attendees about a new golf course he was planning. One whose plans, apparently, were given to him by the Defense Department and “totally wins the case” in his grudge against former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley.
Trump seems to lie most when he believes he can get away with it.
Let’s note that it’s also not quite what he told Fox News’ Bret Baier last week before the audio of the recording became public. “I didn’t have a document, per se,” Trump claimed of the contents of his desk that day. “There was nothing to declassify. These were newspaper stories, magazine stories, and articles.” (Please remember that also in the recording he could be heard saying that “as president I could declassify” the document he’s displaying.)
This obviously isn’t the first time that Trump’s own words have come back to haunt him. When the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape dropped in 2016, it wasn’t hard to discern that it was definitely Trump talking about grabbing women and declaring that “they let you do it when you’re famous.” It was a moment that seemed to have the potential to sink his campaign — but even then, Trump didn’t lie as blatantly as he is doing in this case. Instead, rather than trying to deny what he’d said or invent some new context for it, Trump waved it off as “locker room talk.”
Which brings us back to an important caveat from earlier: Trump seems to lie most when he believes he can get away with it. When giving interviews to the media or speaking to the public, you never know what will come out of his mouth. It’s been a very different story though the few times that he’s actually been under oath and able to be held accountable for what he says. In depositions over his business or personal life, he’s been measured and exact. He was careful to avoid sitting directly for questioning with former special counsel Robert Mueller.
This caution means it’s unlikely that this will be the tale that Trump’s lawyers try to tell during his pending trial. Not with the threat of their client committing perjury and when there will be witnesses to disagree with him. Even Trump knows better than to try to convince a judge and jury that they should trust him over their own ears.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.