One big difference between Trump and Hillary Clinton is that Clinton has been punished for shading the truth.

According to many accounts, it was the young Adolf Hitler who coined the term “Big Lie.” In his 1925 tract, “Mein Kampf,” he wrote that “the broad masses” are more likely to “fall victims to the big lie than the small lie,” because “It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

Contrary to some accounts, neither Hitler nor his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, took credit for successfully using what the French refer to as le grand mensonge: the Nazi leaders always claimed they were telling the truth.

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Donald Trump, we can safely assume, hasn’t been studying the origin of the phrase. But for many months now he has been repeating a very sizable whopper: the claim that he opposed the Iraq War all along. He said it again on Wednesday night, aboard the U.S.S. Intrepid, where he appeared at a “Commander-in-Chief Forum” that was broadcast on NBC and MSNBC. “I was totally against the war in Iraq,” Trump told the moderator, Matt Lauer. “You can look at Esquire magazine from ’04. You can look at before that.”

Actually, plenty of people—journalists, fact-checkers, opposition researchers—have followed Trump’s advice, and what they have discovered is that there is no public record of him criticizing the war before it began. But there is a record of Trump saying he supported it. On September 11, 2002, he appeared on “The Howard Stern Show,” where the host asked him if he was “for invading Iraq.” Trump replied, “Yeah, I guess so. I wish the first time it was done correctly.” This wasn’t the most fulsome of endorsements, it is true. But it clearly indicated that Trump backed sending in troops to overthrow Saddam Hussein. - NewYorker