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It’s seven months until the dodransbicentennial running of the World’s Biggest Liar competition in Santon Bridge, England. This being the 175th anniversary of the prevaricating contest—and the sesquicentennial of the United States of America—I’ve petitioned the referees at the Bridge Inn pub to rescind their rule that politicians, lawyers and real estate agents are prohibited from entering the event.
There is precedent.
For most of the WBL’s life, the contest had been an informal gathering of local yarn spinners. In 1974, however, the competition was open to global liars.
So I’ve asked the umpires to allow President Donald Trump, Secretary Treasury Scott Bessent and Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be given between two and five of the allotted minutes to tell a whopper.
Bumfuzzling is encouraged. No props are allowed.
Trump-Bessent-Kennedy make for a powerful American troika. Indeed, there are days in Washington when all three bend reality like heat over asphalt. Just this week, for instance, they delivered, gift-wrapped in the bureaucratic monotone of a Senate hearing and in the barking of a traveling medicine show that calls itself governance.
On one side of the stage: Bessent, the Treasury man, calm as a bookkeeper at the end of an empire, explaining currency swaps with the United Arab Emirates like they’re aspirin for a global migraine. Dollars for dirhams, stability for chaos, a tidy mechanism designed to keep foreign governments from dumping American assets like bad poker hands in a smoky backroom. The Strait is burning, pipelines are coughing up Persians, and the financial priests are whispering about “orderly markets” while the ceiling tiles shake.
What a splendid sham. It sounds almost reasonable until you remember how we got here.
A war sold like a late-night infomercial—bold claims, no receipts, and a lingering suspicion that the fine print was written in disappearing ink. Now the fallout ricochets from oil terminals to trading desks, and suddenly the same crowd that lit the match is offering to lend out buckets of water—at interest, naturally.
The logic is circular in the way a vulture’s flight is circular: elegant from a distance, grotesque up close.
Meanwhile, Senator Chris Van Hollen raises the kind of question that once upon a time made rooms go quiet: why are we stabilizing allies tied up in the same web of financial interests as the people running the show? It hangs there, unanswered, like cigar smoke in a closed room.
Because the truth, when it wanders too close to the microphones, tends to get escorted out by men in polished shoes.
But not in Stanton Bridge, where the village’s 300 or so souls, all sporting muck-proof wellie gumboots to cross the mighty River Irt, will greet the American con artists as local heroes.
And if Bessent blows it, the U.S. team can make a seamless pivot that only Trumpian politics can pull off. An Olympic-class lurch from macroeconomics to arithmetic—raw, uncut, and violently incorrect.
The Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a man entrusted with matters of life and
dosage, steps up to defend a new mathematical frontier where percentages roam free, unburdened by rules or reason. In this brave new system, reducing a $600 drug to $10 is not a 98% discount—it's a 600% reduction.
Why stop there? Why not 6,000? Why not infinity? The numbers stretch like carnival mirrors, reflecting not reality but desire.
It would be funny if it weren’t attached to the price of survival. But it’s a guaranteed favorite to take home the WBL trophy.
There’s a particular kind of glee in watching elected officials debate whether arithmetic itself is negotiable. It’s the same madness that fuels late-night dice games in back alleys—except here the stakes are insulin, chemotherapy, and the thin line between managing a condition and being consumed by it. When the numbers stop meaning what they mean, the whole structure starts to wobble. Trust, already on life support, flatlines quietly in the corner.
And presiding over it all is Trump, tossing out percentages like confetti, daring anyone to sweep them up. “You could say whatever you want,” Trump says, and there it is—the entire philosophy boiled down to a bumper sticker. Reality is optional. Precision is for suckers. If the number sounds big enough, it becomes true enough for the crowd.
This is championship lying.
Deflect, reframe, insist.
When confronted with contradictions, the pros don’t resolve them. They multiply them. A currency swap becomes a strategic masterstroke, even if the beneficiary doesn’t clearly need it. A pricing claim becomes revolutionary, even if it collapses under the weight of basic math. The goal of tournament lying isn’t coherence; it’s momentum.
How long does it last?
Well, the as-of-now 1,002-day countdown clock until Inauguration Day 2029 is ticking down to a likely WBL three-peat for the Trump Administration.
Clock it in days, because that’s how the system measures endurance now, one news cycle at a time.
From this moment to the next presidential inauguration, you’re looking at hundreds of days that provide thousands of chances for Trump to reimagine arithmetic and, like 19th-century WBL founder and former champion Will Ritson, claim to grow turnips so big that they’re hollowed out and sold as condos for cows.
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