As ever, Donald Trump was transparent about his motive for misleading the American people. He told a cabinet meeting about the “catastrophe” in Spain. “It looks like an invasion of a country. Hundreds of thousands of people,” he said.

“And that same thing’s going to happen to us if the Republicans don’t get elected.” He is worried about the midterm elections in three months’ time, in which the Democrats are currently projected to win both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

He will therefore seize on anything that can be twisted for propaganda purposes into an argument that a Democrat-controlled Congress would be weak on immigration. Hence his use of the scenes from Ceuta, the Spanish exclave on the coast of Morocco, to suggest that Europe has lost control of its borders because of the “very liberal law” of the socialist Spanish government.

Those pictures were certainly alarming and tragic. At least 77 people died when an estimated 60,000 rushed to cross from Morocco to Spanish territory. But President Trump seemed to neither know nor care that these irregular migrants had next to no prospect of making it to Spain proper and the European continent. Most of them, in fact, have already returned to Morocco, many of them voluntarily on finding that they cannot obtain food.

The situation in Ceuta illustrates migration pressures similar to those along America’s southern border. It also illustrates the dangers of misinformation, as it seems that the surge was prompted by fake stories about a recent Spanish court ruling.

But much of what President Trump said on camera and in his post on Truth Social was itself misinformation. There is no reason to link the surge to the policies of Pedro Sanchez and his socialist government, and it is simply untrue to suggest that mainland Spain, or the European Union, has allowed these irregular migrants to enter.

Mr Trump’s intervention is a distraction from a serious debate about how best to distinguish between economic migrants and genuinely desperate refugees, and how to balance a rules-based order with compassion.

This is only the latest of an avalanche of untruths about Europe disgorged by Mr Trump, other senior Republicans and their cheerleaders. They portray Europe as a hellscape of crime and violence caused by mass immigration, facilitated by left-wing leaders.

Any American who has visited Europe knows that it is nonsense, but most Americans have not, and many are ready to believe this kind of propaganda, aimed at undermining support for the Democrats.

There is little that we can do about that, apart from educating the American public. We do our bit. The Independent is a trusted online brand in the United States, and we are dedicated to reporting the facts as we find them.

But there is something that the British government can do about Elon Musk, Mr Trump’s former ally, who uses his ownership of the X social media platform to pump poisonous untruths into the British online media ecosystem.

This may be aimed primarily at an American political debate, but it has an influence on British politics that is unacceptable. Mr Musk’s support for Rupert Lowe, and his Restore Britain micro-party, considered too extreme by Nigel Farage, is an interference in our democracy paid for by foreign money.

Mr Musk has also waded into the Ceuta controversy, posting on X a video from the 2013 zombie film World War Z with the words: “Wow, the situation in Spain looks crazy!” He later clarified he was “just kidding”, but his algorithm-amplified portrayal of Britain as a crime-ridden dystopia has real consequences in our politics. It is time he was reined in.