Donald Trump had been US president again for less than 15 minutes when he made his first factually dubious claim.
“The vicious, violent and unfair weaponisation of the justice department and our government will end,” he said early in his inaugural address. There is no evidence that former president Joe Biden ordered the justice department to prosecute Trump and no violence took place.
The return of Trump to the White House for his second presidential term is also the return of what one critic called “America’s liar-in-chief”. His first week in office brought a cascade of false and misleading claims about immigration, the economy, electric vehicles, the Panama Canal, his election defeat in 2020 and the January 6 insurrection that followed.
