In the middle of an interview last week with 60 Minutes, Donald Trump seemed to take a perverse joy in baiting anchor Lesley Stahl as she attempted to wrangle him into submission. “Lesley, it’s O.K.,” he said, as they clashed over the narrative surrounding his administration’s migrant-family separation policy. “I’m president—and you’re not.” A week later, still riding high on the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh and, perhaps, taking inspiration from the Saudis, Trump sounded less concerned than ever with trivialities like objective truth. Holding court before a gaggle of reporters outside the White House as Marine One idled on the South Lawn, Trump unleashed a dizzying sequence of half-truths and fairy tales, because he is the president, and the reporters in front of him were not.

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“They have a lot of everybody in that group, it’s a horrible thing. And it’s a lot bigger than 5,000 people,” he said Monday afternoon, referring to a massive caravan of Central American refugees currently plowing through Mexico en route to the U.S. (In fact, the migrant caravan is a lot smaller than 5,000 people.) But rather than be content with a heaven-sent midterm talking point, Trump escalated. “Go into the middle of the caravan, take your cameras, and search. . . . You’re going to find MS-13, you’re going to find Middle Eastern, you’re going to find everything.” Criminals, knife-wielding murderers, potential Islamic extremists—that completes Trump-midterm bingo.

There is, of course, no reason to believe that “Middle Easterners” are mixed up in the caravan of refugees fleeing violence from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, beyond the fact that it would be convenient for Trump if it were true. A former senior intelligence official told NBC News that there is no evidence of any Middle Eastern terrorists hiding in the caravan. The White House has not responded to requests for comment regarding any of Trump’s claims.

Nevertheless, Trump continued his jazz riff of lies, doubling down on his false claim that Californians are “rioting” against “sanctuary cities,” which he first tossed out at a campaign rally over the weekend. “Take a look, they want to get out of sanctuary cities. Many places in California want to get out of sanctuary cities,” he told a reporter, who then asked exactly where the riots were. “Yeah, it is rioting in some cases,” he replied, and moved on, ignoring additional questions on the topic.

Trump could not avoid questions about Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi exile and former Washington Post columnist who was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul earlier this month—but he could inflate the potential consequences of placing sanctions on his new friends in Riyadh. “I don't want to lose a million jobs, I don’t want to lose $110 billion,” he said, referring to an arms deal that has actually only earned $14.5 billion so far. “But it’s really $450 billion if you include other than military. So that’s very important. But we’re going to get to the bottom of it,” he added.

It’s not clear how the money at stake quadrupled in Trump’s mind, but then again, the president has a habit of inflating numbers when the mood strikes. On March 20, when the Saudi crown prince visited Washington, Trump claimed the arms deal would generate “over 40,000 jobs in the United States.” Last Saturday, that number jumped to 450,000 jobs, then to 500,000 jobs, then 600,000 jobs on Friday, and finally “over one million jobs” a few hours later, while visiting Luke Air Force Base in Arizona.

Arguably his most brazen falsehood, however, came in response to a question about Ted Cruz, who Trump was flying out to Texas to support. “He’s not Lyin’ Ted anymore, he’s Beautiful Ted. I call him Texas Ted,” he said over the roar of helicopter blades, extolling the virtues of a man whose wife he’d insulted in the past. A reporter reminded him that he’d once accused Cruz’s father of being involved in the J.F.K. assassination, to which Trump replied: “I don’t regret anything, honestly. It all worked out very nicely.”

Trump, at the very, very least, appeared to walk back an earlier fairy tale from Sunday, when he had baselessly asserted that he was “studying very deeply, around the clock, a major tax cut for middle-income people” that would come in “sometime around the first of November, maybe a little before that.” The one problem: Congress is not in session until after the election, and indeed, media outlets quickly reported that nobody in Washington had any idea what Trump was talking about. “I’m going through Congress. We won’t have time to do the vote,” he said Monday, barreling through the sort of quotidian, blatant falsehood that might have been a major, years-long scandal for another president. The full conversation needs to be seen to be believed, or not, as the case may be:

Reporter: You said “lower tax cuts.” You said that you wanted tax cuts by November 1. Congress isn’t even in session. How is that possible? Trump: No, we’re going to be passing—no, no. We’re putting in a resolution sometime in the next week, or week and a half, two weeks. Reporter: A resolution where? Trump: “We’re going to put in—we’re giving a middle-income tax reduction of about 10 percent. We’re doing it now for middle-income people. This is not for business; this is for middle. That’s on top of the tax decrease that we’ve already given them. Reporter: Are you signing an executive order for that? Trump: No, no, no. I’m going through Congress. Reporter: But Congress isn’t in session, though. Trump: We won’t have time to do the vote. We’ll do the vote later. Reporter: Congress is out.

Running out of room to maneuver, Trump concedes there was never going to be a new tax-cut bill before November 6. Still, he concludes, “We’ll do the vote after the election.”