It's not every day that the President of the United States blasts out a truly intergalactic fabrication. Well, it kind of is. Even so, it's worth remarking on whenever El Jefe says something that is not merely spin—not just a massaging of the truth or a distortion of reality—but something approaching the diametric opposite of what actually exists in the world. In this case, it may well be the full antithesis. Because Donald Trump, American president got himself on the Tweet Machine this fine Monday morning in January and rolled out a new brain-collapsing claim about his position on healthcare coverage.

Mini Mike Bloomberg is spending a lot of money on False Advertising. I was the person who saved Pre-Existing Conditions in your Healthcare, you have it now, while at the same time winning the fight to rid you of the expensive, unfair and very unpopular Individual Mandate.........and, if Republicans win in court and take back the House of Represenatives [sic], your healthcare, that I have now brought to the best place in many years, will become the best ever, by far. I will always protect your Pre-Existing Conditions, the Dems will not!

This is just unbelievably brazen lying, even by current Presidential Standards. The Trump administration is right now, this second, backing a lawsuit that would completely dismantle the Affordable Care Act. It would strip the guaranteed protection for preexisting conditions that is one of the law's primary achievements and leave nothing in its place. This is real life: people will lose their coverage and go bankrupt if the decision goes that way. Funny enough, the people who want the law struck down have made it clear to the court that this can wait until after the 2020 election—when they might face some repercussions for their actions. 68 percent of respondents in a Kaiser Family Foundation poll last year said they wanted to maintain the protections.

This is the guy we’re supposed to just trust when it comes to the prospect of war with Iran. Tasos Katopodis Getty Images

This is just the latest tactic employed by the Republican Party to destroy the law after previous legislative attempts failed. At least those attempts went through the motions of replacing the law. But bills like Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy's Repeal and Go Fuck Yourself would have offered states the opportunity to apply for waivers to get certain illnesses and medical conditions exempted from pre-existing condition classification. Considering how many (red) states opted out of the free money for Medicaid expansion under Obamacare, it's safe to say some would carve out exemptions for the benefit of private insurers. (After all, the reason this is an issue is that private insurance companies consider it bad for business to actually cover stuff, which goes in the cost column on the balance sheet.) All this is to say that not everyone would have kept their preexisting conditions coverage. Trump endorsed that and every other repeal effort.

Maybe this is a what-did-you-expect moment, considering that soon after this morning's message the president proceeded to retweet a bunch of randos suggesting Democratic Party leadership supports the Iranian Mullahs. This included a meme (?) of Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi that seemed to use traditional Islamic dress as a slur, and a separate photo depicting horrific violent injury to...someone. Who knows who they are? Could be anyone. After all, no one knows who's behind the account that tweeted it, either, but the President of the United States shared it with his 70 million followers all the same.

Still, the lies matter, and not just because this is yet another volley in the president's unceasing war on the concept of objective reality. The truth, after all, is whatever you can get enough people to believe. But there's also concrete evidence that lying works on this specific issue. As Brian Beutler pointed out on Twitter today, Josh Hawley flagrantly misrepresented his position on the issue during his 2018 Senate race against Democrat Claire McCaskill. Hawley ran ads where he suggested he "support[ed] forcing insurance companies to cover all pre-existing conditions" at the same time that, as Missouri's attorney general, he'd signed the state onto a lawsuit that would shred the Affordable Care Act—including the protections. That's the same one still winding its way through the courts, and which the Trump administration supports. Hawley won.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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