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After facing off against Donald Trump in June, President Joe Biden explained his poor debate performance in part by telling reporters, “It’s hard to debate a liar.” He had a point—by one estimate, Trump made more than 30 false claims that night, on everything from Roe v. Wade and January 6 to China, taxes, and, depending on who you ask, his own golf game.

In fact, there’s a name for Trump’s apparent tactic: The “Gish Gallop.” The term refers to a rhetorical strategy of, basically, overwhelming your opponent with false or incoherent information. As Robert Talisse, a professor of philosophy and political science at Vanderbilt University and co-author of the book Why We Argue (And How We Should): A Guide to Political Disagreement in an Age of Unreason, describes it, to employ the Gish Gallop is “to paralyze and immobilize the dialectical opponent by just burying him or her in a morass of bad arguments and empirically questionable claims.” As a result, the opponent can’t address all of the claims at once, or get to any prepared remarks—making it appear as if the “Gish Galloper” has won the debate.

The name comes from creationist Duane Gish, who frequently took on scientists in evolutionary debates in the 1980s and 90s. National Center for Science Education director Eugenie Scott coined the term, writing in 1994 that the formal debate format meant “the evolutionist has to shut up while the creationist gallops along, spewing out nonsense with every paragraph.”

To see what she means, here’s a clip of Gish from the early ’80s. He goes on at about the 24-minute mark:

Knowingly or not, four decades later, Trump appears to have embraced the same tactic. “Like Gish before him, Trump ceaselessly repeats claims that have been publicly discredited,” journalist Mehdi Hasan argued in the Atlantic last year in an excerpt of his book, Win Every Argument: The Art of........

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