Trump's March 4, 2025 Speech to Congress: Why Are His Lies So Persuasive?

“Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old. It lists 3.6 million people from ages 110 to 119. I don’t know any of them. I know some people that are rather elderly, but not quite that elderly…. But a lot of money is paid out to people, because it just keeps getting paid and paid.” 

So President Donald Trump said during his speech to Congress yesterday, March 4, 2025, but he spoke falsely. Unfortunately, falsehoods, distortions, twisted arguments, and outright lies filled Trump’s speech. Politicians tell lies: who would have thought? The real question is, what makes these lies persuasive?

There is a rhetorical reason that massive chains of falsehoods persuade people. The RAND Corporation calls this technique the “Firehose of Falsehoods.” The answer lies in the numbers. A basic propaganda technique is to unload, not one lie, but a vast number of outrageous lies. It’s not a single lie, it’s a firehose. Tell one lie, and the audience might catch you. Spray out enough lies and, well, that is a different story A barrage of arrogant lies can persuade people when a single mild fib does not. To echo the old slogan, quantity has a quality of its own.

Trump's Speech of January 6, 2021: A "Firehose of Falsehood"

There’s also a psychological reason that massive chains of falsehood persuade people. The psychological theory called the Elaboration Likelihood Model states that people who lack the time, attention, or ability to check facts will tend to believe things that they have heard repeatedly.

So, look at a few of Trump’s outrageous statements.


What about Social Security?

Whenever someone says, “believe it or not,” as Trump did, my Spidey sense tingles away. Trump expounded further:

“And it really hurts Social Security and hurts our country, 1.3 million people from ages 150 to 159 and over 130,000 people, according to the Social Security databases, are age over 160 years old.”

Now, Wired magazine notes that the problem in the Social Security spreadsheet results, not from real data, but from a programming glitch. The chart was created by an obsolete programming language called COBOL that failed to read death dates for older Social Security recipients. Furthermore, Lee Dudek, the new Acting Commissioner of Social Security, notes that “These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits.” 

Analyzing the problem in yet more detail, FactCheck.org notes that, although some ineligible people do receive Social Security benefits, the number is nowhere near as great as what Trump claimed. Social Security’s data shows that fewer than 90,000 actual Social Security recipients are 100 years old or older. That sounds about right. So, Trump was just carelessly wrong. Since his claims had been publicly refuted weeks earlier, he has no excuse. 

But Trump told other lies. 


A Mandate? I Think Not

Asserting his power, Trump claimed that:

“The presidential election of November 5th was a mandate like has not been seen in many decades.”

ABC News’ fact checkers note, however, that: “Trump's margins of victory — both in raw votes and in percentages — were small by historical standards.” In fact, in the final election results, Trump received 49.9% of the popular vote, against 48.3% for his opponent, Kamala Harris. Trump won, yes, but a popular vote advantage of only 1.6% hardly counts as a mandate.


Ended a Non-Existent Mandate? I Think Not

Well, the lies poured on. Trump claimed that he saved the auto industry by ending an “electric vehicle mandate:”

“We ended the last administration’s insane electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto workers and companies from economic destruction.”

Oddly, as ABC’s fact checkers note, the Biden administration did not impose an electric vehicle mandate. The administration had signed off on stricter automobile emission standards, which Trump did, in fact, revoke. But an electric vehicle mandate? Didn’t exist.


An Autism Epidemic?

Is there an autism epidemic? Vaccine skeptics and vegetarians cite a supposed autism epidemic to support their views of clean living. Trump’s unqualified Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Trump himself, have repeatedly harped on that.

So, it was no surprise in yesterday’s speech when Trump said:

“Not long ago — and you can’t even believe these numbers — one in 10,000 children had autism. One in 10,000, and now it’s one in 36. There’s something wrong. One in 36. Think of that.”

However, a research team led by Sebastian Lundström published this in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry in 2022 said:

“Much – or even most– prevalence increase seems to reflect changes in diagnostic practice and ascertainment.”

Similarly, Tony Charman finds in the prestigious journal The Lancet Psychiatry, 2025, that:

“The authors argue this finding does not indicate rising prevalence per se but changes in the GBD methodology, specifically the exclusion of studies relying on passive case finding (registries or administrative estimates), which underestimate prevalence. The authors found no evidence of an increase in prevalence across a 15-year time window.”

In other words, the supposed increase in autism seems in large part to reflect changing diagnostic criteria, plus more interest by mental health professionals when they work with clients.


Lies and More Lies?

Tell one lie, and you probably persuade no one. Tell a hundred lies? Well, that’s different.  Suppose that Trump tells ten lies in a row. One after the other. Let us suppose that most of the lies are either invented out of thin air, or sucked from the dim recesses of Fox News or Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s dubious website. Lies are easy to produce, since they can arise from nothing, but they are often troublesome to refute. Any debater knows that it is hard to prove a negative.

Elon Musk, DOGE, and the Art of Squirming

ABC News’ fact checkers reviewed 12 of Trump’s claims, finding only one to be true, while marking the others with labels like “false,” “misleading, or “lacks context.” FactCheck.org, the premier fact-checking website, studied 12 of Trump’s claims, including some that were different from those that ABC examined, finding all 12 to be dubious. For example, they noted that Trump falsely claimed that Panama had turned control of the Panama Canal over to China. Trump lied about alleged savings from the Department of Government Efficiency and fentanyl shipments from Canada—among other falsehoods.

Now, think about it. After all, how many readers are going to study 12 (or more) seemingly nit-picking fact checks? Or look at several fact checkers? Or examine scientific and historical literature for themselves to verify every throwaway claim that Trump blustered out? Even the fact checkers got exhausted, which is why different fact checking websites covered different claims. It takes time; it takes effort. Isn’t it easier just to dismiss the fact checks as “liberal propaganda” or, maybe, “all politicians tell lies, who cares?”

And that is how the Firehose of Falsehoods overwhelms our critical processes.

Unfortunately, a barrage of lies overwhelms people’s critical capacities. I spent hours just looking up the fact checks that I cited above, and I hardly scratched the surface of Trump’s onslaught. If I didn’t want to write this blog post, would I spend that much time on it? Not likely.

For it was not just one lie. It was a firehose. Suppose someone lies to you and you check them. Fine. But what if someone pumps out dozens of lies? Some of them will slip through. Keep in mind, of course, that many of Trump’s falsehoods have long circulated on Fox News, talk radio, and social media. The Firehose of Falsehoods floods our search for truth. Quantity has a quality of its own.

I have posted previously about the Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion, developed by psychologists Richard E. Petty and John T. Cacioppo. Their theory claims how people process and respond to persuasive messages. They show that when people use the Central Route to process a persuasive message, they gather information and think critically. However, the Central Route takes time. It takes effort. It often requires skills that not everyone has.

The alternative is the Peripheral Route. When people lack the time, ambition, or skill to use the Central Route, they might look at the source’s attractiveness or perceived expertise, or simply the frequency with which messages are received, or other trivial criteria. That is where Trump’s cascade of lies works. People who use the Central Route will quickly reject Trump’s ludicrous claims. People who use the Peripheral Route might be impressed by Trump’s self-confidence, charismatic speaking style, and, most of all, the relentless firehose of misinformation. At that point, sadly, quantity takes on a quality of its own, and, audiences can get overwhelmed.


Conclusion

Trump’s rhetoric could never persuade wise, careful listeners, but wise, careful listeners are not his audience. To be fair, no one has the time or ability to study and verify every single persuasive message. Trump obviously knows that. By presenting a deluge of obvious, easily discredited lies, Trump carried his listeners on a roller coaster ride of bluster, suspicion, paranoia, and absurdity. As a master of those dark arts, Trump follows the path of the Big Lie. As Goebbels demonstrated in the previous century, if you want to tell lies, go big.

by William D. Harpine  

____________

Research Note: 

Here is the original article about the Firehose of Falsehood. Any current persuasion textbook will discuss the Elaboration Likelihood Model. Richard Perloff's book is worth a look. I have blogged about the Elaboration Likelihood Model several times. This post about Paul Ryan seems apropos to the moment:

Paul Ryan Gave a Speech about Civility, but Are We Listening?

Image: Official White House photo

Copyright © 2025 by William D. Harpine

Paul Ryan Gave a Speech about Civility, but Are We Listening?

Paul Ryan, official portrait

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan gave a speech in the United States Capitol yesterday to congressional interns. He told them that civility was important, and explained that ideas need to make a difference. He deplored the mindless anger that fills political talk. I agree. As a former high school and college debater, I prefer for us to hear both sides of every issue, and to believe the points that are best proven. I agree with few of Ryan's policies, but I am happy to hear his ideas, and think that conservatives should be willing to hear ideas that liberals and moderates express.

Ryan especially called out social media which, he said, "just amplifies all of these trends. It is an industry where you can make money feeding fear and resentment." Although Ryan did not mention President Donald Trump, we all know that Twitter is his preferred   communication channel, so we do have something to worry about. Ryan continued, "We are caught in this paradox where we are more connected than ever, but we could not feel more disconnected or more alienated.”

Ryan continued that civility was not just important because it was good to be polite. He also noted that, to discuss ideas, we need to do more than debate in "a stream of hot takes and tweets." Ryan said that, when he is attacked on social media, he tries "not to respond in kind but to respond with kindness." He pointed out that "snark sells, but it doesn't stick. It doesn't last. It doesn't unite people around a bigger idea or a greater cause."

Ryan is, of course, right about that. The Elaboration Likelihood Model, a psychological theory of persuasion, shows that attitude change is more likely to last, and more likely to change our behavior, when it is based on "central processing;" that is, on deliberative thought. Twitter is not designed for deliberative thought.

Trump Tweet about "Fake News"

I'm sure that the news media would have liked Ryan to call out President Trump more explicitly, especially since Mr. Trump uses his Twitter account to declare open war on them, and they surely feel beleaguered. In the long run, however, Ryan's more measured speech made the point well enough. If Ryan gave an angry or insulting speech, he would have contradicted his own point. We can only hope that the future leaders to whom he spoke will heed the lesson.

And we can hope that the public will stop voting for politicians who spew out mindless rage. The loudest voices are not always right. In my experience, the loudest voices are usually wrong. 

P.S. Twitter can be productive if it links readers to websites that contain accurate, in-depth information. Too often, however, my Twitter feed just links me to conspiracy theory websites, wild speculation, or obnoxious memes. So, it's hard to disagree with Ryan's speech.

See my earlier post about Elaboration Likelihood, which shows why we need to speak reasonably.


Image of Paul Ryan: Official congressional photo

People Did Not Believe Cassandra's Warnings about the Trojan Horse, and People Didn't Believe Bill Gates' Warning about Viral Pandemics

Coronavirus, CDC Image

When Cassandra, a tragic heroine in Greek mythology, rebuffed the moon-god Apollo, he laid a terrible curse on her: she would always tell the truth, but no one would ever believe her. So, when she warned the people of Troy not to trust “Greeks bearing gifts,” they ignored her and brought the Trojan horse into their city. We know how that turned out.

Given my lifetime career specializing in persuasion and debate, I can imagine few worse fates than to tell the truth and never be believed. Yet such was the fate of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who gave a brilliant Ted Talk in April 2015 – almost 5 years ago – to warn us that a virus pandemic was coming and that we were not ready for it. As we all know, over the next five years, our government took too little action to prepare for a viral pandemic, while President Donald Trump rolled back much of what little progress we had made.

People didn’t take Gates seriously. And yet, Gates had everything going for him. He is articulate. He is respected by Republicans and Democrats alike. Billionaires recognize him as one of the richest among them. His Ted Talk was well prepared and brilliantly argued. Like Cassandra, he was ignored.

To gain the audience’s attention, Gates rolled out an enormous barrel and talked about his youth. He said, “The disaster we worried about most was a nuclear war. That’s why we had a barrel like this down in our basement filled with cans of food and water. When the nuclear attack came, we will go downstairs down and eat from  that barrel.” He then warned that viruses pose a greater threat than atomic attack: “today the greatest risk of global catastrophe doesn’t look like this." pointed to the barrel. "Instead it looks like this.” He then showed an electron microscope photo of a virus. He continued: “If anything kills over 10 million people in the next two decades, it is most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war; not missiles but microbes.”

He argued that a repetition of the 1918 flu epidemic would kill 30 million people if it occurred today. He pointed out that, if we saw a Hollywood movie about a virus, a team of experts would swiftly move in to contain it. But, in real life, he explained that neither the world nor the United States has anything like that ready to go: “but that’s just pure Hollywood.” He continued: "The failure to prepare could allow the next epidemic to be dramatically more devastating than Ebola.” Gates explained that not just the United States, but Third World countries also needed to have access to vaccines and medical care. There is no guarantee that geography will confine a virus epidemic.

Gates pleaded that the world needs to “dramatically change the turnaround time to look to the pathogen and be able to make drugs and vaccines that fit for that of pathogen, so we can have tools, but those tools need to be put into an overall global health system, and we need preparedness.”

As we look at the pathetic response that the United States, Italy, and other nations have made to the coronavirus, it is obvious that Gates’ warnings were never heeded.

Gates' conclusion was chilling: “we don’t have to hoard cans of spaghetti or go down into the basement, but we need to get going because time is not on our side.” 

He was right. Time was not on our side.

Like Cassandra, Gates was right about just about everything. Like Cassandra, Gates watched in frustration as people ignored his warnings. He now says that we waited too long and can no longer avoid a coronavirus shutdown. What is most shocking is that, even this week, with catastrophe upon us, tens of millions of people continue to trust the outrageous falsehoods on conservative media, which went so far as to call the pandemic a hoax, and which were further promulgated by the president. Many people continue to support President Donald Trump's weak response to the pandemic even as they face death head-on.

In 1973, when I started graduate school at Northern Illinois University to study argumentation and debate, I took my first class from nationally-famous persuasion expert Charles Urban Larson. Like the naïve debate student that I was, I wrote a brief comment in one of my papers that logic was important in persuasion. When he returned my paper with a probably-undeserved A, Larson had penned a little note telling me that logic had nothing to do with persuasion. At the time, I was deeply offended. I now hereby apologize to Professor Larson. A world that was even minimally capable of logical thinking would have responded enthusiastically to Gates’ warning. Cassandra was right, but ancient Troy didn't listen. Gates was right, but the world didn't listen to him, either. So here we are.

Follow-ups for communication specialists: the Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion does give us some reason to think that, under certain circumstances, logic and evidence can be persuasive. The issue seems to be that people need to feel that they are competent to think about evidence and have the time and motivation to do so. When people do not feel that they are able to examine evidence, they might instead listen to authorities instead of thinking for themselves. Unfortunately, too many people think that charlatans like President Trump and cable news hosts are authorities. So, as I said, here we are. Also, from a psychological standpoint, people don't take rare dangers seriously. They worry about next week's stock market, but don't worry about a hurricane or pandemic that strikes maybe once or twice a century.

I've blogged about the Elaboration Likelihood Model a few times earlier.

Here's a transcript of Gates' Ted Talk. 

You Might Persuade Climate Change Skeptics by Giving Them Information

Climate Change and the Amazon Drought

The big problem with most climate change speeches is that the speakers tell the audience that there is a lot of evidence about climate change, but they don’t explain what the evidence is. I showed in my previous post that you can’t persuade climate change skeptics by insulting them and calling them names. You also can’t persuade climate change skeptics just by promising that the scientists agree. That asks them to change their minds on faith, and skeptics are not going to change their minds on faith. They need evidence. That doesn’t mean that evidence will always persuade them; it won’t. But evidence is all we have.

Persuasion Theory

Let’s go over a few basic points of persuasion theory.  A well-established persuasion theory is the Elaboration Likelihood Model, which I have written about a few times. This theory, developed by psychologists Richard E. Petty and John Cacioppo, says that there are two paths by which listeners process persuasive messages. People follow the central path when they think about a message carefully. This occurs when people are motivated to analyze a persuasive message and feel that they have the skill and knowledge to do so. The peripheral path does not involve careful thinking. Instead, the listener relies on peripheral cues, such as whether the listener likes the speaker, finds the speaker attractive, or already has a positive attitude toward the message. The number (as opposed to the quality) of messages gives listeners a peripheral cue.

When people change their attitudes over the central route, the attitude change is likely to be long-lasting and to influence their behavior. For example, it might influence their long-term voting. But attitude change that occurs over the peripheral route is likely to be temporary and easily changed. Furthermore, attitude change over the peripheral route is unlikely to change people’s long-term behavior. Much advertising, including most political advertising, aims at the peripheral route. That, for example, is why many political messages are ridiculously short and convey little actual information. Voters who process information on a given topic by the central route will ignore such short, simple messages.

Speakers cannot control whether the audience will process a message by the central or peripheral route. They can, however, offer the audience opportunities to process information. When a speaker says, “scientists agree about climate change,” the speaker is appealing purely to the peripheral route. That almost all scientists do, in fact, agree about climate change is a peripheral cue. Climate change skeptics, however, are exposed to many other peripheral cues.  For example, they hear Fox News hosts and talk radio personalities call climate change a hoax. When speakers give the audience too little information, they offer the audience little chance to process a message by the central route. Of course, a highly motivated audience member can find the research on Google Scholar. But how many people will do so? Climate change speakers make a mistake when they do not invite central route processing. Here are the reasons why and what to do about them:

First, the evidence for climate change is complex. A superficial speech cannot address complexities.

Second, audience members might not feel that they have the knowledge or ability to analyze the scientific information for themselves. People use the central route only when they feel motivated and capable. That is why it becomes a speaker’s job to present information in a way that is accessible and persuasive. That requires a speaker to do research (and I’ve often commented that speakers need research) and to present that research to the audience in a way that is clear and well-organized. That requires a speaker to make a lot of effort, but the effort might pay off in a higher likelihood that the audience will choose to process the information critically.

Third, the speaker needs to give the audience a reason to think carefully about climate change. The central route requires effort! That is where Greta Thunberg has been doing a great job. She is enthusiastic and knows how to get the audience’s attention. But what she has not done, however, is to help people understand the information. That’s probably too much to expect from any 16-year-old speaker, no matter how smart she is, so it’s time for other speakers to pick up the load and take the next step.

Fourth, it is necessary to anticipate the most common objections that climate change skeptics present. Skeptics will say that scientists once complained about global cooling, which is partially true. They will point out that there are natural causes of climate change. This is also true, although a bit beside the point. Some people will flat-out deny that the climate is changing at all, since day-to day weather changes much more than the two degrees of warming that we’ve seen so far from climate change. Speakers should not expect conservative objectors to give them a reasonable chance to engage in back-and-forth dialogue. That experience, which high school and college debate teams take for granted, rarely occurs in the real world. Instead, speakers need to anticipate and preempt the major objections, and to refute those objections with care. Speakers should assume that they only get one shot to make their case. (That doesn't mean that one speech is enough, but that's a topic for another day.) Again, asking the audience to take something on faith invites them to process the message by the peripheral route.

All effective persuasion comes down to giving people information. The better job a speaker does of presenting information, the more likely it is that audiences will respond. We ask a lot of people when we expect them to cut back how much they use the fossil-fuel energy sources that have made the industrial nations so prosperous. It is wrong to think that changing people’s minds will ever be an easy job. Any time we think about persuasion, we need to think about the audience.

So, that’s what persuasion research tells us. In my next post, I’ll show how these persuasion principles might work in a practical way. 

P.S. Many good sources explain the Elaboration Likelihood Model. Here’s a simple, accurate explanation by an Oregon State University professor. Any current persuasion textbook will also discuss this model. Ambitious (and wealthy) readers can buy an e-book version of Petty and Cacioppo’s book here.

Image from NASA.