Newt Gingrich, one of president-elect Donald Trump’s closest political allies, said on Thursday that Trump will “spend a lot of time controlling the border. He may not spend very much time trying to get Mexico to pay for it, but it was a great campaign device.” This is an astonishing claim, given that one of Trump’s signature promises, made in his first speech announcing his presidential run and repeated countless times, was that he “will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall.”

Now we discover it was probably just a “campaign device,” which is a craven’s way of saying it was an intentional over-promise, if not a lie. Nor was this the only such device Trump used. We’re discovering that some of his most famous promises may have been made with his fingers crossed.

Joyce Karam of pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat reported Thursday that, according to Arab diplomatic sources, the Trump campaign reached out to Middle East embassies in Washington, D.C. three months after Trump declared a ban on Muslims entering the U.S.: “The message from the Trump campaign to key Arab diplomats last Spring was a plea to ‘ignore Mr. Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign trail.’” This might explain why Trump is still trying to figure out what to do with the Muslim ban, which briefly disappeared from his website on Thursday, only to reappear.

Trump also said on the campaign trail that he woul “dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran,” calling it his “number-one priority.” But Walid Phares, a senior foreign policy adviser to Trump, told the BBC on Thursday that “he’s gonna take that agreement, it’s been done before in international context, and then review it.... He will take the agreement, review it, send it to Congress, demand from the Iranians to restore a few issues or change a few issues, and there will be a discussion.”

It’s not news that Donald Trump is perhaps the biggest fabulist in American political history, someone who engages in a wide variety of untruths, ranging from tall tales and fibs to outright fabrications. Perhaps his slippery relationship with truth comes from being a real estate developer, a profession where fantastic hyperbole is accepted—if not required—in the negotiation room. Trump’s political promises can be viewed through a similar lens: If he has no real intent to make Mexico pay for the wall or ban all Muslim immigrants, these statements can be seen as a special type of deception: pie-in-the-sky salesmanship.