He was always a "lie, lie and lie until you make it" kind of guy, it's just that in the last couple of years he's been doing it widely enough and long enough that the real results of enough of his lies came though and enough people started suspecting his words and looking at them more carefully and spotting the lying early.

As the saying goes, "you can deceive some people all of the time or all people some of the time, but you can't deceive all people all of the time" - and at some point, when he became more widely known, he seems to have gone from the first mode to the second and by now he's run out of time.