With Donald Trump back in office for a year, it seems increasingly clear what his motto should be: “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” Whether about grocery prices, January 6, Ukraine or actions by ICE agents, Trump keeps making astonishingly false statements that contradict what we can see with our own eyes.

In recent weeks, Trump has once again sought to bamboozle us into not believing what we saw – the most egregious recent example involved the ICE agent who killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis. Within hours of her death, Trump smeared Good on Truth Social, saying that the 37-year-old mother of three belonged to “a Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate” and that she “viciously ran over the ICE officer”. Trump added, “It is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.”

What Trump said was light years from what we saw. Videos show that Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed Good, not only wasn’t knocked over by her SUV, but walked away after he shot her three times.

With that false version of events, Trump sought to send a message to officials throughout his administration that they should badmouth Good and defend Ross to the hilt. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, rushed to malign Good as a rioter and domestic terrorist, while Vice-President JD Vance denounced her as a “deranged leftist”.

Trump’s outrageous assaults on the truth bring to mind a memorable line from comedian Richard Pryor: “Ya gonna believe me or your lyin’ eyes?” In his standup act, that was Pryor’s response to his mad-as-hell wife after she discovered him in bed with another woman. Like other brazen demagogues, Trump seems to believe he has a magical power to persuade us not to believe what our........

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