WASHINGTON—Democrats will kick seniors off their health insurance. Democrats will end insurance protections for people with health problems. Democrats will destroy the Social Security retirement system. Democrats will give illegal immigrants free cars. Democrats will abolish America’s borders. Democrats are behind the latest migrant caravan from Latin America. That caravan includes people from the Middle East.

False, false, false, false, false, false, false.

U.S. President Donald Trump made a brief attempt to campaign on his record of accomplishments but, as the November congressional elections approach, he has traded that shiny new positivity for the well-worn tactic that helped him win the presidency in 2016: a blizzard of fear-mongering and lies, many of them about darker-skinned foreigners.

Trump has been a serial liar about just about everything for his entire tenure in office, but he has rarely before deployed so many complete fabrications about so many important subjects at the same time.

His most frequent and significant recent whoppers have centred on immigration, the issue about which his base has been most excited, and health care, the issue polls suggest is most important to the Democratic base.

Trump escalated his immigration dishonesty on Monday morning. Seizing on a groundless claim from a host on his favourite Fox News morning show, he tweeted that “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in” to a caravan of Latino migrants that began in Honduras.

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Reporters travelling with the caravan have seen no Middle Easterners, but the tweet was a way to get voters thinking about the supposed dangers of both Latino criminals and Muslim terrorists, Trump’s two favourite subjects of suspicion in 2016.

Stuart Anderson, who served as Immigration and Naturalization Service executive associate commissioner for policy under George W. Bush, said Trump “is trying to scare some segment of voters into believing immigrants are threats.”

“I think the president is taking advantage of the inherent deference most Americans have for the office of the presidency, where people assume a president may sometimes exaggerate but won’t simply make things up,” said Anderson, now executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy.

Trump and the Republicans have made repeated attempts to replace the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, with a law that would let states allow health insurance companies to charge hefty fees to people who have medical conditions.

His response to the unpopularity of this strategy has been to insist that “Republicans only” will protect people with pre-existing conditions and that “Democrats won't be able to do it” — even though Democrats passed the protections in the first place and plan to keep them.

“Republicans are trying to obscure their record on insurance deregulation because pre-existing condition protections are very popular with Americans of all political persuasions,” said Jonathan Oberlander, a University of North Carolina professor who studies health policy and politics.

“They are worried that the truth — which is that Republicans have been trying to roll back the (Affordable Care Act’s) consumer protections — will cost them votes.”

Trump’s dishonesty careened into the realm of absurdity on the weekend.

At a rally in Arizona on Friday, he half-jokingly said that since many Democrats are willing to give driver’s licences to unauthorized immigrants, “next thing you know they’ll want to buy ’em a car.” At his Nevada rally on Saturday, he asserted that Democrats already do want this: “They want to give ’em cars.”

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At the Nevada rally, Trump also declared that California residents on his side of the immigration debate are “rioting” in opposition to “sanctuary” policies that limit law enforcement co-operation with federal immigration authorities. There has been no rioting at all from California conservatives.

But some of those conservatives argued that Trump was not lying. Dave Harrington, the Republican mayor of Aliso Viejo, Calif., said he thought Trump was “referring to the Republican form of rioting: we do it through discourse and policy suggestion, not on mob and interrupting people’s dinner.” He lamented that people take Trump “so literal all the time.”

“I think it shows a lot of people kind of lack a sense of humour,” he said.

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