It took just two minutes for former President Donald J. Trump to utter his first lie of the evening, claiming once again that the 2020 election had been stolen.

By four minutes into the televised interview on Thursday night, he was claiming that this time around “we’re leading by a lot” in the polls, setting up another false claim of a stolen election should he lose on Tuesday.

By five minutes into the program, he had turned to assailing his successor’s record in office and was claiming that in the last few years the country had experienced “the worst inflation we’ve ever had.”

None of that was true. And that was just the first 300 seconds. For the rest of the evening, Mr. Trump spouted one statement after another that was fanciful, misleading, distorted or wildly false. He rewrote history. He claimed accomplishments that he did not accomplish. He cited statistics at odds with the record. He described things that did not happen and denied things that did.

Public appearances by Mr. Trump throughout this year’s campaign have been an Alice-in-Wonderland trip through the political looking glass, a journey into an alternate reality often belied by actual reality. At its most fundamental, it boils down to this: America was paradise on earth when he was in charge, and now it’s a dystopian hellscape. Nuance, subtlety, precision and ambiguity play no role in the version that Mr. Trump promotes with relentless repetition. And it is a version that has found traction with tens of millions of supporters.

Truth is not always an abundant resource in the White House under any president, but never has the Oval Office been occupied by someone so detached from verifiable facts. Mr. Trump’s four years in power were a nonstop treadmill for fact-checkers trying to catch up with the latest. His four years since leaving arguably have posed an even bigger challenge as he descended further into conspiracy theories, particularly around election integrity.