(CNN) With Donald Trump’s presidency in the rear-view mirror, there’s a natural human tendency to sort of forget about what he did to the nation’s highest office. Let’s look to the future — and all that.

But it’s important to keep reminding ourselves of the various ways in which Trump sough to fundamentally undermine and redefine the presidency. Or put more simply: How incredibly abnormal the last four years were when compared to, well, every other modern presidency.

Which brings me to a new analysis from The Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog — breaking down the false and misleading claims made by both Trump and current President Joe Biden in their first 100 days in office.

The contrast is striking. Biden made 67 false or misleading claims in that period as compared to Trump’s 511, according to the Post’s tally. Which, if you do the math, means that Trump said more than seven times as many misleading or outright false things than Biden did during the critical first 100 days of each of their presidencies. SEVEN times!

“After four years of a presidency that swamped Americans with a gusher of false and misleading claims, the Joe Biden era has offered a return to a more typical pattern when it comes to a commander in chief and his relationship with the facts — one that features frequent spin and obfuscation or exaggeration, with the occasional canard,” concluded the Post’s Glenn Kessler, Adrian Blanco and Tyler Remmel.

Sit with that for a minute. And then consider this: Trump’s pace of mistruths — and outright lies — rapidly picked up as his term went on. His first 100 days was the most truthful period of time during his entire presidency.

As CNN’s Daniel Dale noted in a lookback piece of four years of fact-checking Trump:

“In 2017, Trump averaged 2.9 false claims per day. By 2018, it was 8.3 false claims per day. … Trump’s 2017 dishonesty tended to be impromptu ad-libbing. His 2018 dishonesty was much more scripted; he used serial lying as a deliberate strategy in the midterm elections. Then he used serial lying as a deliberate strategy in his 2019 Ukraine scandal. Then he used serial lying as a deliberate strategy in his response to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic — holding daily ‘briefings’ so wildly dishonest that CNN needed me to go on TV right afterward to debunk the nonsense viewers had just heard.”

And of course, none of that even takes into account the fact that Trump continues to propagate the Big Lie — that the 2020 election was fraudulent or stolen from him despite zero evidence of wrongdoing. (Even as I type, Arizona’s state Senate Republicans are conducting a “recount” of the ballots in Maricopa County that is baffling at best.) Polling suggests Republican voters prefer Trump’s falsehoods to the objective truth. A Quinnipiac University poll released in February showed 75% of self-identified Republicans agreeing with the statement that there was “widespread fraud in the 2020 election.”

Biden’s fact-check performance has returned the norm we expect from presidents and politicians: Truth-stretching and exaggerating in the main, with the occasional whopper thrown in but rarely repeated. The question is whether Trump’s pattern of dishonesty means that no matter what Biden does, we may never return to “normal.”

Trump may no longer be president — and he may never run for president again. But even if he decides to take a pass on running in 2024, Trump’s impact not just on politics but on our culture is massive — and nowhere is it bigger (or more problematic) than when it comes to his attempted erasure of truth and facts.

In recognition of the challenges posed to existing interpretations of the protections of the First Amendment, Hasen has called for adoption of a set of measures

that implicate First Amendment concerns including disclosure of the funders of both online ads and mass coordinated activities aimed at influencing elections; labeling deep fakes and other synthetic media as “altered”; tightening the ban on campaign expenditures by nonmedia foreign persons, entities and government; and enacting a narrow ban on empirically verifiable false election speech.

In an essay published Tuesday night on Slate, “U.S. v. Trump Will Be the Most Important Case in Our Nation’s History,” Hasen wrote:

The federal indictment just handed down by special counsel Jack Smith is not only the most important indictment by far of former President Donald Trump. It is perhaps the most important indictment ever handed down to safeguard American democracy and the rule of law in any U.S. court against anyone.

Hasen predicted that when tried, Trump will assert First Amendment defense, including his right to make false claims. But, Hasen argued:

Trump did not just state the false claims; he allegedly used the false claims to engage in a conspiracy to steal the election. There is no First Amendment right to use speech to subvert an election, any more than there is a First Amendment right to use speech to bribe, threaten, or intimidate.

Francesca Procaccini, a law professor at Vanderbilt, shares the view that in the contemporary political environment, there needs to be more regulation of speech. In an email, she wrote:

The left is split on how to respond to misinformation precisely because the left is historically committed to free speech and also to uplifting marginalized voices. It was once true that these concerns overlapped (the people’s voices who were being silenced were marginalized voices), but the script has become more complicated. Now, many on the left have increasingly come to understand that speech itself (whether false speech or hate speech) is also detrimental to marginalized communities.

“For my own part,” Procaccini wrote, “I believe speech and ideas have power, and like anything of great power, they require some democratic oversight.”

“The virality, anonymity and speed of the internet,” she continued, have “fundamentally changed the ‘circumstances’ and the ‘context’ of speech online, justifying different regulations on speech in that environment than we would want to impose in the physical public square.”

Since Citizens United, which effectively freed corporations and unions to spend money on electioneering communications and to advocate the defeat or election of candidates directly, “the left has been increasingly skeptical of a maximalist approach to free speech, given how the conservative Supreme Court has used the right to protect and advance conservative policy goals,” Procaccini argued. “Now that First Amendment-protected speech quite literally incited a riot and nearly a coup, long-running concerns about the weaponization of free speech appear more salient.”

Catharine MacKinnon, a law professor at the University of Michigan, expanded on the left critique of free speech jurisprudence in a 2020 article, “Weaponizing the First Amendment: An Equality Reading.” MacKinnon argued that:

Once a defense of the powerless, the First Amendment over the last hundred years has mainly become a weapon of the powerful. Starting toward the beginning of the 20th century, a protection that was once persuasively conceived by dissenters as a shield for radicals, artists and activists, socialists and pacifists, the excluded and the dispossessed, has become a sword for authoritarians, racists and misogynists, Nazis and Klansmen, pornographers and corporations buying elections in the dark.

Freedom of speech, MacKinnon continued,

has at the same time gone from a rallying cry for protesters against dominant power to a claimed immunity of those who hold dominant power. Thus weaponized, the First Amendment has morphed from a vaunted entitlement of structurally unequal groups to have their say, to expose their inequality, and to seek equal rights, to a claim by dominant groups to impose and exploit their hegemony.

Justice Elena Kagan used the phrase “weaponizing the First Amendment” in a 2018 dissent in Janus v. State, County and Municipal Employees. The majority decision was a devastating blow to public employee unions. It concluded that “states and public-sector unions may no longer extract agency fees (partial union dues) from nonconsenting employees.”

This procedure, the majority wrote,

violates the First Amendment and cannot continue. Neither an agency fee nor any other payment to the union may be deducted from a nonmember’s wages, nor may any other attempt be made to collect such a payment, unless the employee affirmatively consents to pay.

“There is no sugarcoating today’s opinion,” Kagan argued in her dissent:

The majority overthrows a decision entrenched in this nation’s law — and in its economic life — for over 40 years. As a result, it prevents the American people, acting through their state and local officials, from making important choices about workplace governance. And it does so by weaponizing the First Amendment.

The majority, Kagan continued, “has chosen the winners by turning the First Amendment into a sword, and using it against workaday economic and regulatory policy.” The majority’s road “runs long. And at every stop are black-robed rulers overriding citizens’ choices. The First Amendment was meant for better things. It was meant not to undermine but to protect democratic governance — including over the role of public-sector unions.”

One of the most telling and damning allegations in the Fulton County indictment goes to the shocking sweep of the Trump plan to steal an election he knew he would lose. Act 1 of the indictment recounts how Trump discussed with an unindicted co-conspirator, four days before the election, the content of a speech “that falsely declared victory and falsely claimed voter fraud.”

This revelation not only punctures Trump’s defence that he believed he won the election and that it was stolen from him, but also displays the criminal intent with chilling premeditation. If he ever testifies in court, Trump will have to argue he firmly believed he was robbed of his victory by fraud before it happened.

The indictment’s charges against Trump go full circle, concluding with a reprise of his run at Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia Secretary of State. Trump again claimed he won and should be declared the victor in a letter to Raffensperger dated September 2021, almost a year after the election –  perhaps as a proffer of evidence that he still believed his own misrepresentations.

As predicted in advance by Byline Times, the lion’s share of the indictment was based on broad Georgia statutes criminalizing false statements and filings. 22 of the 41 felony counts involved false statements and documents. Many other overt acts listed in furtherance of the conspiracy consisted of misrepresentations which could have been charged as additional Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organization or RICO counts.

The Fulton Country District Attorney is looking at the same facts as the federal indictment, but under different laws and with the potential for new uninvestigated evidence

Stephen Humphreys

The King of Falsehoods

Of 19 alleged RICO conspirators indicted, 14 were charged with knowing misrepresentations to state authorities. Strangely, two of the most outlandish proponents of the Big Lie, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis, were not charged with making false statements — perhaps because they did not do the speaking to state authorities, but were usually only backup singers to Rudy Giuliani on television — though that could be charged under the Georgia criminal statutes.

Their false statements may have also been omitted from the charges because even Donald Trump said their conspiracy theories sounded “crazy,” though he went along with their tales that Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, dead since 2013, rigged the voting machines (one of the lies that cost Fox News $787 million, so far, in cases brought by voting machine companies).

One of the elements of the Georgia false statement criminal statute is that the misrepresentation is knowing.

Powell and Ellis’s state of mind could prove an evidentiary problem. But Trump’s declaration that they were off their rockers is excellent evidence that he knew his co-conspirators were spinning yarns about the stolen election.

It is no surprise that Trump himself is the undisputed misrepresentations champion, charged with six counts of false statements and false filings, with two additional counts involving forgery. It should also come as no surprise that Trump actually inflated some of the misrepresentations of his co-conspirators/co-defendants.

In Act 113 of the indictment, Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in the infamous phone call trolling for 11,780 more votes, that 250,000 to 300,000 “ballots were dropped mysteriously into the rolls” in the November 2020 election. Trump also claimed that “hundreds of thousands of ballots” were “dumped” into Fulton from an adjacent county. He said “thousands of voters were turned away from the polls after being told “a ballot had already been cast in their name.” Without showing his calculations, Trump claimed he won Georgia by 400,000 votes.

There was no source for any of this information in the indictment, even in the prior claims of Trump’s confederates.

Trump attributed 18,000 fraudulent votes for Biden at the State Farm Arena to Ruby Freeman, who Giuliani only accused of passing around “USB ports” like “vials of heroin.”

In apparent compensation, Trump reduced the claims for identifiable groups of people. Giuliani told the Georgia legislature 10,315 dead people voted. The Georgia lawsuit filed by Trump and John Eastman on the last day of 2020 claimed “as many as 10,315 or more” dead people voted in Georgia in 2020, but Trump told Raffensperger it was close to 5000. Raffensperger said the actual number was two dead people for whom votes were recorded.

According to the indictment, Trump told Raffensperger that 904 voters illegally registered at a post office box, down from “at least 1043“ listed in the lawsuit. Trump told Raffensperger there were 4502 unregistered voters, up from 2423 listed in the lawsuit.

In the infamous call, Trump appears to have omitted the claims in the lawsuit that over 66,000 underage Georgians voted, and over 2500 felons.

As Byline Times predicted, the verification of these knowingly false numbers formed the basis of one of the most glaring RICO felony misrepresentation counts. Because the verification of a lawsuit is made under oath, it could satisfy even the stricter requirements for perjury and federal false statements felonies.

As predicted, Trump’s Tweets played a role, with 13 being listed as overt acts in furtherance of the conspiracy. Though some are ambiguous, some of them include clear and verifiable knowing misrepresentations of matters under state jurisdiction.

Act 114, for example:

On or about the 3rd day of January 2021, DONALD JOHN TRUMP caused to be tweeted the Twitter account @RealDonaldTrump, “I spoke to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday about Fulton County and voter fraud in Georgia. He was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such the ‘ballots under the table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters’, dead voters, and more. He has no clue.”

The indictment is conservatively charged, however, and did not include such tweets as felony counts, though they fit the broad Georgia statute.  There is nothing in the language of O.C.G.A. § 16-10-20 that requires the state to prove that a defendant made the defendant’s false statement directly to a department or agency of either a particular city or a county. Rather, the state need only show that the statement was made in a matter within the jurisdiction of one or more of those governments.

From my year-long experience consulting with Fani Willis about the scope of the conspiracy, she is staying well inside her legal limits to avoid creating an appeal issue that could drag out a Trump conviction for years. There could be a question whether some of the misrepresentations in the tweets—about Mike Pence’s power to reject Georgia’s electoral votes, for example, are matters under Georgia state jurisdiction, as required by the false statements statute. Nonetheless, the truth-challenged tweets definitely form an important part of the smoke and mirror atmospherics of the alleged RICO conspiracy.

After 16 days of lawyers questioning witnesses and presenting evidence, today prosecutors for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg will argue to the jury of five women and seven men in a courtroom downtown that Donald Trump knowingly and willingly committed 34 felonies.

The alleged crimes have nothing to do with Trump cheating on his wife with porn actress Stormy Daniels. That the single assignation in Lake Tahoe on July 13, 2006 occurred when first-time mother Melania was home in New York with infant Barron, who would celebrate his four-month birthday four days later, adds to the tawdriness, but not the legal exposure.

The first crime, as the assistant district attorneys will explain, was when Trump henchman Michael Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 in exchange for her keeping quiet. The money was wired on Oct. 27, 2016, 12 days before the Nov. 8 election and 20 days after the notorious “Access Hollywood” tape came out with Trump bragging about freely groping women.

Already wounded by his own voice and image on video, Trump had every reason to prevent Daniels from telling of their tryst which could torpedo his campaign and he conspired with Cohen to silence Daniels with the cash payment. Such a large sum meant to influence an imminent election was a federal campaign finance felony that Cohen would later plead guilty to and serve prison time for. Keep that Cohen crime in mind.

Trump’s crimes, according to the DA, would come after he was in the White House and he was repaying Cohen. In the ledgers of his real estate business, the Trump Organization, Trump had 34 times caused to have entered falsehoods that the money being sent to Cohen was for “legal expenses.” They were not “legal expenses.” Lying on business records in New York is a misdemeanor, but if it is done to further another crime, the misdemeanor becomes a felony.

Remember Cohen’s felony? Putting it together with the rigged books, you get 34 felonies by Trump from the fake notations listed in the records. If the money to Cohen was designated as “Stormy payoffs” there would be no lie and therefore no crime.

So Trump’s nature for him to lie about everything is what may finally sink him. Decades ago, Trump used to call reporters at this paper and elsewhere, falsely claiming to be PR man John Miller or John Barron, peddling some pro-Trump gossip. That may have been the origin of the name of Barron that would be bestowed on his youngest child.

These lies about the Cohen repayments are not the worst of Trump’s alleged crimes, like trying to overturn a fair presidential election in several states or subverting the certification by Congress or attempting to keep classified documents even when the federal government tried to recover. Those offenses go to his abuse of power when he held the highest office in the land.

At issue today and to be adjudged by the Manhattan jury this week are mundane lies by Trump, but they go to everything that Trump has been doing for nearly 78 years. He has always been a liar and a cheat and a charlatan, a nice word for a con man. That is his charm and his roguish appeal.

It’s fine for the host of a cheesy reality show, but it’s a terrible fit for a president.