Has Donald Trump forgotten how to sound like he’s telling the truth? – leader comment

Donald Trump’s denial that the US wants to make the NHS part of a post-Brexit trade deal with the UK was unequivocable – if you can believe it.

President Donald Trump wouldn't want the NHS to be part of the US-UK trade deal even if it was offered to him "on a silver platter", he said (Picture: Patrick Semansky/AP)

Perhaps Donald Trump has told so many lies – 13,435 false or misleading claims in just 993 days in office, according to a Washington Post count in October – that he’s forgotten how to sound like he’s telling the truth.

As he denied Labour’s main attack line in the election campaign – that Boris Johnson is planning a UK-US trade deal which would ruin the NHS, a claim the Conservatives strongly deny – Trump went comically too far.

“I have nothing to do with it. Never even thought about it, honestly,” he said.

“I don’t even know where that rumour started. We have absolutely nothing to do with it and we wouldn’t want to if you handed it to us on a silver platter, we want nothing to do with it.”

The only problem is that, in June, he said “when you’re dealing in trade, everything is on the table” in response to a question about the NHS’s place in the talks. We await his explanation.

Maybe it’ll be as good as when he belatedly explained backing Vladimir Putin over the US security services’ intelligence on Russian interference in American elections by claiming he missed out the word “not”.