Trump's truth troubles: Caught red-handed again!

Over the years former President Donald Trump has certainly demonstrated that he has a slippery grip on stating the truth. Recently Trump claimed that he never suggested his former political rival Hillary Clinton should be imprisoned. However, this assertion was swiftly debunked by the media.

While speaking with Fox and Friends on June 2nd, the former president coolly told a little white lie that quickly blew up in the United States for its audacity. The former president claimed he never once said: “Lock her up”. 

Trump’s now infamous catchphrase from the 2016 election and beyond has not been as prominent in his campaign speeches of late, which tend to focus more on making fun of his current political enemies than his past ones. 

However, Trump undoubtedly has uttered the phrase “lock her up,” a fact that the former president tried to gloss over and completely revise in his interview with Fox and Friends. But how did this weird situation come about?

Everything started when Fox and Friends host Will Cain questioned Trump on the chant  ‘lock her up’ and his reluctance to do so when he was president. But the response Cain got in return likely wasn’t what he was expecting.

“You famously said, regarding Hillary Clinton, ‘Lock her up.’ You declined to do that as president,” Cain said to Trump. “I beat her… It’s easier when you win. And they always said ‘lock her up,’” the former president said, according to The Hill. 

“I felt…  I could have done it, but I felt it would have been a terrible thing. And then this happened to me,” Trump continued before he went on to say that he had never called for Clinton to be locked up but rather blamed the chant on his supporters. 

“I didn’t say ‘lock her up,’ but the people said ‘lock her up, lock her up,’” Trump added. “Then, we won. And I say — and I said pretty openly, I said, all right, come on, just relax, let’s go, we’ve got to make our country great.”

The Hill reporter Nick Roberston noted in his report that Trump did indeed demand that Clinton be sent to prison during his campaign and the chant “lock her up” was a staple at his rally events among his supporters. 

Other news outlets went a lot further in their desire to fact-check the former president’s remarks, including CNN, which reported Trump would often pause his speech at rallies in 2016 to allow his supporters to chant: “Lock her up.”

CNN also quoted a few of Trump’s very own words from 2016 that showed the former president not only said that Clinton should be locked up, but also revealed that Trump had actually said the words “lock her up” on several occasions. 

“For what she’s done, they should lock her up,” Trump said to a crowd in 2016 at a rally in October in North Carolina. “‘Lock her up’ is right,” he also said during an October rally in Pennsylvania. But that isn’t all the former president said. 

CNN also reported Trump called for Clinton’s imprisonment in a number of ways and by using a lot of different phrasing. “Hillary Clinton has to go to jail, OK? She has to go to jail,” the former president said during a June 2016 speech in California.

Trump did soften his calls to lock Clinton up after he defeated her in 2016 according to CNN. However, the news organization added that once Trump’s reelection campaign began in 2020, he also began calling for Clinton to be locked up again 

“You should lock her up, I’ll tell you,” Trump said at a January 2020 campaign rally in Ohio. So it seems the former president has a long history of saying Clinton should be put behind bars, which goes against what he said on Fox and Friends. 

Rolling Stone reported that as recently as August 2023, Trump suggested that he could lock Clinton up while speaking about the matter with Glenn Beck. Beck asked Trump: “Do you regret not ‘locking her up.’ And if you’re president again, will you lock people up?”

Trump responded to Beck by saying: “The answer is you have no choice, because they’re doing it to us." It was a worrying comment and one that the country might see come true if the former president is reelected in November.

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