At a Cabinet meeting on Thursday, President Donald Trump told a lengthy story about negotiating the creation of a personalized Sharpie pen. The only problem: the company that produces Sharpies denies it ever happened.Theoretically, Trump’s tall tale was an attempt to prove his skill at saving money. It started with complaints about cost overruns tied to the renovation of the Federal Reserve building, but then the pen he was holding caught his attention, and it was tangent time. “This pen is an interesting example,” before relating a presumably improvised story in which he called “the guy” and told him, “I’d like to use your pen, but I can’t have a great thing with a big S on it saying Sharpie as I’m signing a $1 trillion airplane contract to buy brand new fighter jets.” “The guy,” said the President, offered to provide personalized black pens with “the White House” written in gold free of charge, until Trump insisted on paying $5 a pen. Setting aside that this story does not, in fact, prove Trump’s thrift — were it authentic, he would have successfully negotiated the price up from free to $5 — it also turned out that it simply wasn’t true. According to a spokesperson from the manufacturer of Sharpie, “We don’t have any information about the conversation described.”So with another Trump whopper in the news, here are five of his biggest and most baffling lies from the past several years.1. “They’re eating the dogs.” Who can forget when, at a presidential debate against Kamala Harris, Trump claimed that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating the city’s pets? Apparently voters forgot, and fast, because they elected him president shortly thereafter.2. Wind energy is “driving whales crazy.” Earlier this week, the Trump Administration agreed to pay nearly $1 billion to stop the construction of wind farms off the U.S. coast. He’s given all manner of justifications for his hatred of wind turbines over the years, but arguably the most nonsensical is his assertion about their effect on whales.3. Impossible drug prices. Over the past year, Trump has frequently claimed that his administration would cut drug prices by “900, 600, 500, 1,200” percent, and many other numbers. These numbers are, of course, impossible because math doesn’t work that way. If drug prices were reduced by 100%, they’d be free, and anything more than that, and they’d be paying you to take them.4. His uncle knew the Unabomber. Last year, Trump boasted that his Uncle John was a professor of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski at MIT, but it was quickly pointed out that that couldn’t be possible. First off, Kaczynski never went to MIT. Second, Uncle John died in 1985, and Kaczynski wasn’t revealed to be the Unabomber until 1996, so there was no way Unk could have spoken to Trump about the terrorist a decade before he was found to be one.5. He warned us all about Osama bin Laden. Just recently, Trump brought back a lie he’s told before: that the book he published in 2000 contained a warning that Osama bin Laden was going to commit a major attack. “I wrote it in a book. You can even check — about a year before the World Trade Center came down.” Indeed you can check, and people have, finding no such prediction.
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