At a campaign rally last week in Michigan, former president Donald Trump claimed that “Kamala has spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants.”

Could it possibly be true? This is the sort of question Duke University’s Bill Adair and a team of student reporters have been asking themselves for 17 years as they’ve fact-checked politicians and other public figures for the PolitiFact website that Adair created in 2007.

The answer, of course, is no. As William Shakespeare might have said, it is a lie “told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

The truth is that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has two distinct funds. One is to help cities temporarily house migrants. An entirely separate $20 billion fund was created by Congress for disaster relief. This one is running low because of the number and scope of disasters this year, but the two funds are not interchangeable, nor is either being used for purposes other than those intended.

During and after Hurricanes Milton and Helene, FEMA has been present and working to help victims, largely to the acclaim of state and local leaders.

At a news conference to address Helene’s damage to parts of the state, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, said federal assistance had “been superb.” He mentioned that President Joe Biden, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell had each called to offer support.

This is what one would expect from federal officials during a crisis, of course, and it wouldn’t require highlighting but for Trump’s intentional lies.

As a rule, I’m not one to use the words “lie,” “lying” or “liar.” Their power to destroy someone’s reputation is too great for comfort. But Trump has forced many of us, including Adair, to abandon the soft-pedaling etiquette of euphemism and to say what is factual. Lying, for Trump, is so reflexive that he needn’t bestir his fourth-grade vocabulary to seize headlines and malign those he finds inconvenient to his purposes.

Will things ever change? Not soon, says Adair. Unfortunately, lying pays dividends in today’s universe of partisan television, radio and social media, and for a complicit political base manipulated by sophisticated consultants. What’s needed is more fact-checking, which means more money and more staff, and for Americans to demand that the lying stop.

Over the years, Adair and his revolving teams of students have created a methodology and a “Truth-O-Meter” for assessing the accuracy of a given statement.

Adair is quick to note that political lying began long before Trump. President Richard M. Nixon lied about the Watergate burglary out of self-preservation. President Bill Clinton lied about “sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky,” because he was in very hot water with everyone (except his feminist supporters, who remained curiously silent).

In a sense, Trump is the inevitable benefactor of a culture of lies that has become normalized through passive acceptance of lying as simply the nature of politics. Thanks to the fire hose of 24/7 news, there’s hardly time to clean up one mess before a hundred more have been dumped on the living room floor by people paid to create and disseminate falsehoods.

Adair explains in his new book, “Beyond the Big Lie,” that politicians every day try to score points with key constituencies: voters, party leaders, influencers and media figures. “A decision to lie is a simple math equation: I am likely to score enough points with this lie that it will outweigh any consequences it might have from voters/donors/the media.”

Through numerous interviews with political pundits, pollsters, politicians and public figures, Adair has learned that lies are mostly manufactured for a candidate’s base, whose members are willing to accept anything that affirms what they already believe. For the Republican base, which readily embraced Trump’s earlier birther lie that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, it takes little to persuade them that Harris would steal money to support illegal migrants.

In what is certain to ignite passions on the right, Adair states that Republicans lie more than Democrats do. He spends several pages explaining how “facts” are selected for scrutiny, but it basically comes down to whether something just doesn’t sound right. For example: Does it sound right that Harris “stole” FEMA money to house illegal migrants rather than help hurricane victims?

Actually, no - which is why PolitiFact gave Trump a “pants on fire!” rating for telling this easily disprovable lie.

Voters concerned about truth and the consequences of lying might want to check with PolitiFact at least as often as they check the polls. This week, they’ll learn that Trump, contrary to what he recently told Hugh Hewitt, has never been to Gaza. And that Harris’s claim that unemployment is at a historic low for all groups of people was rated only “half true.” It’s good to know the truth, even if you don’t like it.