Trump's First 100 Days

The Washington Post reports that President Trump made 492 false statements in his first 100 days in office.   That is a lot of alternative facts!

Here are the numbers for the president's first 100 days.

492: The number of false or misleading claims made by the president.   That's an average of 4.9 claims a day.
10: Number of days without a single false claim.   (On six of those days, the president golfed at a Trump property.)
5: Number of days with 20 or more false claims.   (Feb. 16, Feb. 28, March 20, April 21 and April 29, his 100th day in office.)
You can view all the false claims in the links below.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/05/01/president-trumps-first-100-days-the-fact-check-tally/?utm_term=.0c63c4d552c9

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.8cfc9afe5be5



A Summary of President Trump's Lies (January 21, 2017 - June 23, 2017)

Many Americans have become accustomed to President Trump's lies.   But as regular as they have become, the country should not allow itself to become numb to them.   So we have catalogued nearly every outright lie he has told publicly since taking the oath of office.

By DAVID LEONHARDT and STUART A. THOMPSON JUNE 23, 2017 NYT

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/23/opinion/trumps-lies.html

Jan. 21 "I wasn't a fan of Iraq. I didn't want to go into Iraq."
(He was for an invasion before he was against it.)
Jan. 21 "A reporter for Time magazine - and I have been on their cover 14 or 15 times. I think we have the all-time record in the history of Time magazine."
(Trump was on the cover 11 times and Nixon appeared 55 times.)
Jan. 23 "Between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes caused me to lose the popular vote."
(There's no evidence of illegal voting.)
Jan. 25 "Now, the audience was the biggest ever. But this crowd was massive. Look how far back it goes. This crowd was massive."
(Official aerial photos show Obama's 2009 inauguration was much more heavily attended.)
Jan. 25 "Take a look at the Pew reports (which show voter fraud.)"
(The report never mentioned voter fraud.)
Jan. 25 "You had millions of people that now aren't insured anymore."
(The real number is less than 1 million, according to the Urban Institute.)
Jan. 25 "So, look, when President Obama was there two weeks ago making a speech, very nice speech. Two people were shot and killed during his speech. You can't have that."
(There were no gun homicide victims in Chicago that day.)
Jan. 26 "We've taken in tens of thousands of people. We know nothing about them. They can say they vet them. They didn't vet them. They have no papers. How can you vet somebody when you don't know anything about them and you have no papers? How do you vet them? You can't."
(Vetting lasts up to two years.)
Jan. 26 "I cut off hundreds of millions of dollars off one particular plane, hundreds of millions of dollars in a short period of time. It wasn't like I spent, like, weeks, hours, less than hours, and many, many hundreds of millions of dollars. And the plane's going to be better."
(Most of the cuts were already planned.)
Jan. 28 "The coverage about me in the @nytimes and the @washingtonpost has been so false and angry that the Times actually apologized to its dwindling subscribers and readers."
(It never apologized.)
Jan. 29 "The Cuban-Americans, I got 84 percent of that vote."
(There is no support for this.)
Jan. 30 "Only 109 people out of 325,000 were detained and held for questioning. Big problems at airports were caused by Delta computer outage."
(At least 746 people were detained and processed, and the Delta outage happened two days later.)

Feb. 3 "Professional anarchists, thugs and paid protesters are proving the point of the millions of people who voted to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!"
(There is no evidence of paid protesters.)
Feb. 4 "After being forced to apologize for its bad and inaccurate coverage of me after winning the election, the FAKE NEWS @nytimes is still lost!"
(It never apologized.)
Feb. 5 "We had 109 people out of hundreds of thousands of travelers and all we did was vet those people very, very carefully."
(About 60,000 people were affected.)
Feb. 6 "I have already saved more than $700 million when I got involved in the negotiation on the F-35."
(Much of the price drop was projected before Trump took office.)
Feb. 6 "It's gotten to a point where it is not even being reported. And in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn't want to report it."
(Terrorism has been reported on, often in detail.)
Feb. 6 "The failing @nytimes was forced to apologize to its subscribers for the poor reporting it did on my election win. Now they are worse!"
(It didn't apologize.)
Feb. 6 "And the previous administration allowed it to happen because we shouldn't have been in Iraq, but we shouldn't have gotten out the way we got out. It created a vacuum, ISIS was formed." (The group's origins date to 2004.)
Feb. 7 "And yet the murder rate in our country is the highest it's been in 47 years, right? Did you know that? Forty-seven years."
(It was higher in the 1980s and '90s.)
Feb. 7 "I saved more than $600 million. I got involved in negotiation on a fighter jet, the F-35."
(The Defense Department projected this price drop before Trump took office.)
Feb. 9 "Chris Cuomo, in his interview with Sen. Blumenthal, never asked him about his long-term lie about his brave 'service' in Vietnam. FAKE NEWS!"
(It was part of Cuomo's first question.)
Feb. 9 Sen. Richard Blumenthal "now misrepresents what Judge Gorsuch told him?"
(The Gorsuch comments were later corroborated.)
Feb. 10 "I don't know about it. I haven't seen it. What report is that?"
(Trump knew about Flynn's actions for weeks.)
Feb. 12 "Just leaving Florida. Big crowds of enthusiastic supporters lining the road that the FAKE NEWS media refuses to mention. Very dishonest!"
(The media did cover it.)
Feb. 16 "We got 306 because people came out and voted like they've never seen before so that's the way it goes. I guess it was the biggest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan." (George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all won bigger margins in the Electoral College.)
Feb. 16 "That's the other thing that was wrong with the travel ban. You had Delta with a massive problem with their computer system at the airports."
(Delta's problems happened two days later.)
Feb. 16 "Walmart announced it will create 10,000 jobs in the United States just this year because of our various plans and initiatives."
(The jobs are a result of its investment plans announced in October 2016.)
Feb. 16 "When WikiLeaks, which I had nothing to do with, comes out and happens to give, they're not giving classified information."
(Not always. They have released classified information in the past.)
Feb. 16 "We had a very smooth rollout of the travel ban. But we had a bad court. Got a bad decision."
(The rollout was chaotic.)
Feb. 16 "They're giving stuff - what was said at an office about Hillary cheating on the debates. Which, by the way, nobody mentions. Nobody mentions that Hillary received the questions to the debates." (It was widely covered.)
Feb. 18 "And there was no way to vet those people. There was no documentation. There was no nothing."(Refugees receive multiple background checks, taking up to two years.)
Feb. 18 "You look at what's happening in Germany, you look at what's happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?"
(Trump implied there was a terror attack in Sweden, but there was no such attack.)
Feb. 24 "By the way, you folks are in here - this place is packed, there are lines that go back six blocks."
(There was no evidence of long lines.)
Feb. 24 "ICE came and endorsed me."
(Only its union did.)
Feb. 24 "Obamacare covers very few people - and remember, deduct from the number all of the people that had great health care that they loved that was taken away from them - it was taken away from them."
(Obamacare increased coverage by a net of about 20 million.)
Feb. 27 "Since Obamacare went into effect, nearly half of the insurers are stopped and have stopped from participating in the Obamacare exchanges."
(Many fewer pulled out.)
Feb. 27 "On one plane, on a small order of one plane, I saved $725 million. And I would say I devoted about, if I added it up, all those calls, probably about an hour. So I think that might be my highest and best use."
(Much of the price cut was already projected.)
Feb. 28 "And now, based on our very strong and frank discussions, they are beginning to do just that."
(NATO countries agreed to meet defense spending requirements in 2014.)
Feb. 28 "The E.P.A.'s regulators were putting people out of jobs by the hundreds of thousands."
(There's no evidence that the Waters of the United States rule caused severe job losses.)
Feb. 28 "We have begun to drain the swamp of government corruption by imposing a five-year ban on lobbying by executive branch officials."
(They can't lobby their former agency but can still become lobbyists.)

March 3 "It is so pathetic that the Dems have still not approved my full Cabinet."
(Paperwork for the last two candidates was still not submitted to the Senate.)
March 4 "Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!"
(There's no evidence of a wiretap.)
March 4 "How low has President Obama gone to tap my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!"
(There's no evidence of a wiretap.)
March 7 "122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!"
(113 of them were released by President George W. Bush.)
March 13 "I saved a lot of money on those jets, didn't I? Did I do a good job? More than $725 million on them."
(Much of the cost cuts were planned before Trump.)
March 13 "First of all, it covers very few people."
(About 20 million people gained insurance under Obamacare.)
March 15 "On the airplanes, I saved $725 million. Probably took me a half an hour if you added up all of the times."
(Much of the cost cuts were planned before Trump.)
March 17 "I was in Tennessee - I was just telling the folks - and half of the state has no insurance company, and the other half is going to lose the insurance company."
(There's at least one insurer in every Tennessee county.)
March 20 "With just one negotiation on one set of airplanes, I saved the taxpayers of our country over $700 million."
(Much of the cost cuts were planned before Trump.)
March 21 "To save taxpayer dollars, I've already begun negotiating better contracts for the federal government - saving over $700 million on just one set of airplanes of which there are many sets."
(Much of the cost cuts were planned before Trump.)
March 22 "I make the statement, everyone goes crazy. The next day they have a massive riot, and death, and problems."
(Riots in Sweden broke out two days later and there were no deaths.)
March 22 "NATO, obsolete, because it doesn't cover terrorism. They fixed that."
(It has fought terrorism since the 1980s.)
March 22 "Well, now, if you take a look at the votes, when I say that, I mean mostly they register wrong - in other words, for the votes, they register incorrectly and/or illegally. And they then vote. You have tremendous numbers of people."
(There's no evidence of widespread voter fraud.)
March 29 "Remember when the failing @nytimes apologized to its subscribers, right after the election, because their coverage was so wrong. Now worse!"
(It didn't apologize.)
March 31 "We have a lot of plants going up now in Michigan that were never going to be there if I - if I didn't win this election, those plants would never even think about going back. They were gone."
(These investments were already planned.)

April 2 "And I was totally opposed to the war in the Middle East which I think finally has been proven, people tried very hard to say I wasn't but you've seen that it is now improving."
(He was for an invasion before he was against it.)
April 2 "Now, my last tweet - you know, the one that you are talking about, perhaps - was the one about being, in quotes, wiretapped, meaning surveilled. Guess what, it is turning out to be true."
(There is still no evidence.)
April 5 "You have many states coming up where they're going to have no insurance company. O.K.? It's already happened in Tennessee. It's happening in Kentucky. Tennessee only has half coverage. Half the state is gone. They left."
(Every marketplace region in Tennessee had at least one insurer.)
April 6 "If you look at the kind of cost-cutting we've been able to achieve with the military and at the same time ordering vast amounts of equipment - saved hundreds of millions of dollars on airplanes, and really billions, because if you take that out over a period of years it's many billions of dollars - I think we've had a tremendous success."
(Much of the price cuts were already projected.)
April 11 "I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late. I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn't know Steve."
(He knew Steve Bannon since 2011.)
April 12 "You can't do it faster, because they're obstructing. They're obstructionists. So I have people - hundreds of people that we're trying to get through. I mean you have - you see the backlog. We can't get them through."
(At this point, he had not nominated anyone for hundreds of positions.)
April 12 "The New York Times said the word wiretapped in the headline of the first edition. Then they took it out of there fast when they realized."
(There were separate headlines for print and web, but neither were altered.)
April 12 "The secretary general and I had a productive discussion about what more NATO can do in the fight against terrorism. I complained about that a long time ago and they made a change, and now they do fight terrorism."
(NATO has been engaged in counterterrorism efforts since the 1980s.)
April 12 "Mosul was supposed to last for a week and now they've been fighting it for many months and so many more people died."
(The campaign was expected to take months.)
April 16 "Someone should look into who paid for the small organized rallies yesterday. The election is over!"
(There's no evidence of paid protesters.)
April 18 "The fake media goes, 'Donald Trump changed his stance on China.' I haven't changed my stance."
(He did.)
April 21 "On 90 planes I saved $725 million. It's actually a little bit more than that, but it's $725 million."
(Much of the price cuts were already projected.)
April 21 "When WikiLeaks came out ... never heard of WikiLeaks, never heard of it."
(He criticized it as early as 2010.)
April 27 "I want to help our miners while the Democrats are blocking their healthcare."
(The bill to extend health benefits for certain coal miners was introduced by a Democrat and was co-sponsored by mostly Democrats.)
April 28 "The trade deficit with Mexico is close to $70 billion, even with Canada it's $17 billion trade deficit with Canada."
(The U.S. had an $8.1 billion trade surplus, not deficit, with Canada in 2016.)
April 28 "She's running against someone who's going to raise your taxes to the sky, destroy your health care, and he's for open borders - lots of crime."
(Those are not Jon Ossoff's positions.)
April 28 "The F-35 fighter jet program - it was way over budget. I've saved $725 million plus, just by getting involved in the negotiation."
(Much of the price cuts were planned before Trump.)
April 29 "They're incompetent, dishonest people who after an election had to apologize because they covered it, us, me, but all of us, they covered it so badly that they felt they were forced to apologize because their predictions were so bad."
(The Times did not apologize.)
April 29 "As you know, I've been a big critic of China, and I've been talking about currency manipulation for a long time. But I have to tell you that during the election, number one, they stopped."
(China stopped years ago.)
April 29 "I've already saved more than $725 million on a simple order of F-35 planes. I got involved in the negotiation."
(Much of the price cuts were planned before Trump.)
April 29 "We're also getting NATO countries to finally step up and contribute their fair share. They've begun to increase their contributions by billions of dollars, but we are not going to be satisfied until everyone pays what they owe."
(The deal was struck in 2014.)
April 29 "When they talk about currency manipulation, and I did say I would call China, if they were, a currency manipulator, early in my tenure. And then I get there. Number one, they - as soon as I got elected, they stopped."
(China stopped in 2014.)
April 29 "I was negotiating to reduce the price of the big fighter jet contract, the F-35, which was totally out of control. I will save billions and billions and billions of dollars."
(Most of the cuts were planned before Trump.)
April 29 "I think our side's been proven very strongly. And everybody's talking about it."
(There's still no evidence Trump's phones were tapped.)

May 1 "Well, we are protecting pre-existing conditions. And it'll be every good - bit as good on pre-existing conditions as Obamacare."
(The bill weakens protections for people with pre-existing conditions.)
May 1 "The F-35 fighter jet - I saved - I got involved in the negotiation. It's 2,500 jets. I negotiated for 90 planes, lot 10. I got $725 million off the price."
(Much of the price cuts were planned before Trump.)
May 1 "First of all, since I started running, they haven't increased their - you know, they have not manipulated their currency. I think that was out of respect to me and the campaign."
(China stopped years ago.)
May 2 "I love buying those planes at a reduced price. I have been really - I have cut billions - I have to tell you this, and they can check, right, Martha? I have cut billions and billions of dollars off plane contracts sitting here."
(Much of the cost cuts were planned before Trump.)
May 4 "Number two, they're actually not a currency [manipulator]. You know, since I've been talking about currency manipulation with respect to them and other countries, they stopped."
(China stopped years ago.)
May 4 "We're the highest-taxed nation in the world."
(We're not.)
May 4 "Nobody cares about my tax return except for the reporters."
(Polls show most Americans do care.)
May 8 "You know we've gotten billions of dollars more in NATO than we're getting. All because of me."
(The deal was struck in 2014.)
May 8 "But when I did his show, which by the way was very highly rated. It was high - highest rating. The highest rating he's ever had."
(Colbert's "Late Show" debut had nearly two million more viewers.)
May 8 "Director Clapper reiterated what everybody, including the fake media already knows - there is 'no evidence' of collusion w/ Russia and Trump."
(Clapper only said he wasn't aware of an investigation.)
May 12 "Again, the story that there was collusion between the Russians & Trump campaign was fabricated by Dems as an excuse for losing the election."
(The F.B.I. was investigating before the election.)
May 12 "When James Clapper himself, and virtually everyone else with knowledge of the witch hunt, says there is no collusion, when does it end?"
(Clapper said he wouldn't have been told of an investigation into collusion.)
May 13 "I'm cutting the price of airplanes with Lockheed."
(The cost cuts were planned before he became president.)
May 26 "Just arrived in Italy for the G7. Trip has been very successful. We made and saved the USA many billions of dollars and millions of jobs."
(He's referencing an arms deal that's not enacted and other apparent deals that weren't announced on the trip.)

June 1 "China will be allowed to build hundreds of additional coal plants. So, we can't build the plants, but they can, according to this agreement. India will be allowed to double its coal production by 2020."
(The agreement doesn't allow or disallow building coal plants.)
June 1 "I've just returned from a trip overseas where we concluded nearly $350 billion of military and economic development for the United States, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs."
(Trump's figures are inflated and premature.)
June 4 "At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is 'no reason to be alarmed!'"
(The mayor was specifically talking about the enlarged police presence on the streets.)
June 5 "The Justice Dept. should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted to S.C."
(Trump signed this version of the travel ban, not the Justice Department.)
June 21 "They all say it's 'nonbinding.' Like hell it's nonbinding."
(The Paris climate agreement is nonbinding - and Trump said so in his speech announcing the withdrawal.)
June 21 "Right now, we are one of the highest-taxed nations in the world."
(We're not.)





Trump's First 466 Days

In 466 days, President Trump has made 3,001 false or misleading claims.

The Fact Checker's ongoing database of the false or misleading claims made by President Trump since assuming office was updated April 30, 2018 and reported in The Washington Post.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/?utm_term=.959191d96dfb





President Trump has made 6,420 false or misleading claims over 649 days

By Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly / WaPo / November 2, 2018

If President Trump's torrent of words has seemed overwhelming of late, there's a good reason for that. In the first nine months of his presidency, Trump made 1,318 false or misleading claims, an average of five a day. But in the seven weeks leading up the midterm elections, the president made 1,419 false or misleading claims -- an average of 30 a day. That adds up to a total of 6,420 claims through Oct. 30, the 649th day of his presidency, according to The Fact Checker's database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president. The flood of presidential misinformation has picked up dramatically as the president has barnstormed across the country, holding rallies with his supporters. Each of those rallies usually yields 35 to 45 suspect claims. But the president often has tacked on interviews with local media (in which he repeats the same false statements) and gaggles with the White House press corps before and after his trips.

So that adds up to 84 claims on Oct. 1, when he held a rally in Johnson City, Tenn.; 83 claims on Oct. 22, when he held a rally in Houston; and 78 claims on Oct. 19, when he held a rally in Mesa, Ariz. Put another way: September was the second-biggest month of the Trump presidency, with 599 false and misleading claims. But that paled next to October, with almost double: 1,104 claims, not counting Oct. 31. The burden of keeping track of this verbiage has consumed the weekends and nights of The Fact Checker staff. We originally had planned to include Oct. 31 in this update, but the prospect of wading through 20 tweets and the nearly 10,000 words Trump spoke that day was too daunting for our deadline. The president's proclivity to twist data and fabricate stories is on full display at his rallies. He has his greatest hits: 120 times he had falsely said he passed the biggest tax cut in history, 80 times he has asserted that the U.S. economy today is the best in history and 74 times he has falsely said his border wall is already being built. (Congress has allocated only $1.6 billion for fencing, but Trump also frequently mentioned additional funding that has not yet been appropriated.)

But there are many curious moments, too, suggesting the president is walled off from contradictory information. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump emphatically denied he had imposed many tariffs. "I mean, other than some tariffs on steel -- which is actually small, what do we have? . . . Where do we have tariffs? We don't have tariffs anywhere," he insisted. The newspaper responded by printing a list of $305 billion tariffs on many types of U.S. imports. Nearly 25 times, he has claimed that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was No. 1 in his class at Yale University or at Yale Law School. The law school does not rank, and Kavanaugh graduated cum laude from the college -- the third level, below summa cum laude and magna cum laude. At the time, Yale granted honors rather liberally, so nearly 50 percent of the class graduated with honors, with half of those cum laude.

This is one of those facts that can be easily checked with a Google search, yet the president persists with his falsehood. Similarly, Trump attacked Richard Cordray, a Democrat running for governor in Ohio, for having spent $250 million on renovating the building for the agency he once ran, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That was almost double the actual cost. Oddly, Trump added that after Cordray spent "$50 million on some elevators, it turned out they didn't work." Trump lives in expensive housing, but that's a fantasy. The most expensive elevator ever is the 1,070-foot-high Bailong Elevator, set in a Chinese mountain range. It cost $20 million. Thirteen times, Trump invented whole-cloth stories about Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), the lead plaintiff in a steadily advancing lawsuit that could open up the Trump Organization's books to lawmakers. Trump falsely claimed Blumenthal said he was a war hero and fought in Vietnam's Da Nang province. "We call him ‘Da Nang Richard.' ‘Da Nang' -- that's his nickname," Trump said. Blumenthal described his military record in misleading or false terms on a few occasions before he was elected to the Senate in 2010, but he never said he fought in the theater. Trump also said Blumenthal dropped out of the Senate race (no), barely won anyway (no) and was crying when he apologized (no).

"It's like liberating, like a war, like there's a foreign invasion. And they occupy your country. And then you get them out through whatever. And they call it liberation," Trump declared in Mosinee, Wis., on Oct. 24. Some audience members began yelling, "Get the hell out." This dystopian vision of a violent gang overrunning cities and towns across the United States is divorced from reality. MS-13 operates in a few areas such as Los Angeles, Long Island and the Washington region. It's a gross exaggeration to say that towns are being liberated from MS-13, as if they had been captured. Most striking, the tone of Trump's attacks on Democrats escalated the closer the election approached. The president always had slammed Democrats, but his rhetoric became sharper and increasingly inaccurate in recent weeks.

"They want to erase our gains and plunge our country into a nightmare of gridlock, poverty, chaos and, frankly, crime, because that's what comes with it," he said on Oct. 4. "The Democrat Party is radical socialism, Venezuela and open borders. It's now called, to me -- you've never heard this before, the Party of Crime. It's a Party of Crime, it's what it is. And to pay for their socialism, which is going to destroy our country." On Oct. 18, in Missoula, Mont., Trump falsely said no one even challenges his description of the Democrats as the party of crime. "Democrats have become the party of crime. It's true. Who would believe you could say that and nobody even challenges it. Nobody's ever challenged it," he said. But then he had an unusual moment of doubt. "Maybe they have. Who knows? I have to always say that, because then they'll say they did actually challenge it, and they'll put like -- then they'll say he gets a Pinocchio. So maybe they did challenge it, but not very much."






We have no excuses now.   Our eyes are wide open.

By Dana Milbank, Columnist / WaPo / November 2, 2018

This time, our eyes are wide open.
Exactly two years ago, many Americans held their noses and voted for Donald Trump.   Some were conservatives willing to tolerate his vulgar excesses in hopes of getting tax cuts, a repeal of Obamacare and a friendlier judiciary.   Others had Clinton fatigue.   Sure, they were concerned about Trump's words about Mexican "rapists" and what he liked to do to women -- but maybe those were just words.   Maybe Trump could build a coalition across traditional party lines to get things done.

Now, all Americans have seen the results with their own eyes:

Trump defended neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville.

He oversaw a policy separating young children from their parents and warehoused the kids at the border, including some who have yet to be reunited.

He took Vladi­mir Putin's word over that of the U.S. intelligence community, accepting Russia's denial that it interfered in our election.

He implemented a ham-handed attempt at a "Muslim ban": a travel ban that caused chaos and, in its early incarnations, was struck down as unconstitutional.

He then challenged the legitimacy of a "so-called" judge who temporarily blocked the ban.

He swung erratically from the verge of nuclear war with North Korea, threatening "fire and fury"the likes of which the world has never seen before," to declaring he had fallen "in love" with dictator Kim Jong Un and pronouncing the nuclear threat ended -- though no agreement had been reached.

He fired the FBI director, attacked the attorney general and his deputy, and undermined the rule of law by portraying the Justice Department and the FBI as "corrupt."
He lied about hush money paid to an adult-film actress, as recounted in a guilty plea by the lawyer who arranged the payment.

He had hired Paul Manafort and three other senior campaign advisers who eventually pleaded guilty or were convicted in a sprawling and ongoing criminal probe of Russia, Trump and the 2016 election.

He attacked the news media as the "enemy of the people."

He befriended some of the world's most loathed autocrats, including Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, whose extralegal death squads have killed thousands; and he refused to take serious action after the Saudi regime murdered and dismembered a Post contributing columnist in Turkey.

He opened personal rifts with the leaders of Britain, Germany, Canada and other countries that had been stalwart allies.

He has released an unending stream of invective on Twitter and in speeches, often in vulgar and misogynistic terms.

He insulted John McCain after the Arizona senator's death, initially not ordering flags to be flown at half-staff.

He has established a whole new level of mendacity, averaging 30 false or misleading statements a day now, and totaling 6,420 such bogus claims during his presidency.
And he has exploited and worsened divisions among Americans, coarsened public discourse and used racial hatred, resentment of women's gains and fear of immigrants and minorities as political weapons.

Now, we are seeing Trump close the midterm campaign with openly racist appeals:
He derided "globalists" to fuel a conspiracy theory about Jewish billionaire George Soros invisibly working against America, even after Trump was urged to stop using anti-Semitic tropes.

He fabricated an "emergency" about a caravan of Central American asylum seekers, hundreds of miles from the U.S. border, and ordered a massive mobilization of the military, declaring that the troops should be able to fire on unarmed people.

He declared that he can unilaterally revoke the Constitution's guarantee of citizenship for anyone born in the United States.

He offered more conspiracy theories even after a crazed Trump supporter sent pipe bombs to CNN and a dozen of the president's oft-cited enemies, and when a lunatic apparently motivated by the Trump-inspired paranoia about the caravan murdered 11 Jews worshiping at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.

And he closed the campaign with a vile ad showing a Mexican man who killed two police officers, accompanied by the message: "Democrats let him into our country. Democrats let him stay" -- though the killer came to the United States during the presidency of George W. Bush.

On Tuesday, voters will make a decision in what is the purest midterm referendum on a sitting president in modern times:
Will we take a step, even a small one, back from the ugliness and the race-baiting that has engulfed our country?
Or will we affirm that we are really the intolerant and frightened people Donald Trump has made us out to be?

If we choose the latter, 2018 will in some ways be more difficult to take than 2016.   This time, we don't have the luxury of saying we didn't really know what Trump would do.

Our eyes are wide open.





A year of unprecedented deception: Trump averaged 15 false claims a day in 2018

Unraveling President Trump's top 5 claims | The Fact Checker
By Glenn Kessler / WaPo / December 30, 2018
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics

President Trump's year of lies, false statements and misleading claims started with some morning tweets. Over a couple of hours on Jan. 2, Trump made false claims about three of his favorite targets -- Iran, the New York Times and Hillary Clinton. He also took credit for the "best and safest year on record" for commercial aviation, even though there had been no commercial plane crashes in the United States since 2009 and, in any case, the president has little to do with ensuring the safety of commercial aviation. The fusillade of tweets was the start of a year of unprecedented deception during which Trump became increasingly unmoored from the truth. When 2018 began, the president had made 1,989 false and misleading claims, according to The Fact Checker's database,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/?utm_term=.264708ea63f8
which tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president. By the end of the year, Trump had accumulated more than 7,600 untruths during his presidency -- averaging more than 15 erroneous claims a day during 2018, almost triple the rate from the year before.

Even as Trump's fact-free statements proliferate, there is growing evidence that his approach is failing. Fewer than 3 in 10 Americans believe many of his most-common false statements, according to a Fact Checker poll conducted this month. Only among a pool of strong Trump approvers -- about 1 in 6 adults in the survey -- did large majorities accept several, though not all, of his falsehoods as true. Similarly, a November Quinnipiac poll found 58 percent of voters saying Trump wasn't honest, compared with just 36 percent who said he was honest. The same poll found 50 percent saying he is "less honest" than most previous presidents, tying his own record for the highest share of registered voters saying so in Quinnipiac polling. "When before have we seen a president so indifferent to the distinction between truth and falsehood, or so eager to blur that distinction?" presidential historian Michael R. Beschloss said of Trump in 2018.

Beschloss noted that the U.S. Constitution set very few guidelines in this regard because the expectation was that the first president would be George Washington and he would set the tone for the office. "What is it that schoolchildren are taught about George Washington? That he never told a lie," the historian said. "That is a bedrock expectation of a president by Americans." Trump began 2018 on a similar pace as last year. Through May, he generally averaged about 200 to 250 false claims a month. But his rate suddenly exploded in June, when he topped 500 falsehoods, as he appeared to shift to campaign mode. He uttered almost 500 more in both July and August, almost 600 in September, more than 1,200 in October and almost 900 in November. In December, Trump drifted back to the mid-200s. Trump's midsummer acceleration came as the White House stopped having regular press briefings and the primary voice in the administration was Trump, who met repeatedly with reporters, held events, staged rallies and tweeted constantly.

Trump is among the more loquacious of recent presidents, according to Martha Kumar, professor emerita at Towson University, who has kept track of every presidential interaction with the media, dating to Ronald Reagan. Through Dec. 20, Trump held 323 short question-and-answer sessions with reporters, second only to Bill Clinton through the first 23 months, and granted 196 interviews, second to Barack Obama. More than a quarter of Trump's claims were made during campaign rallies. On Nov. 5, the day before the midterm elections, for instance, Trump held three rallies, yielding a total of 139 false or misleading claims. A review of every statement made by Trump at two of his earlier 2018 rallies found that he exaggerated or made up at least 70 percent of his assertions. Almost as many false claims came during remarks at press events, and about 17 percent were the result of his itchy Twitter finger.

The president misled Americans about issues big and small. He told lies about payments that his now-convicted attorney says Trump authorized to silence women alleging affairs with him. He routinely exaggerates his accomplishments, such as claiming that he passed the biggest tax cut ever, presided over the best economy in history, scored massive deals for jobs with Saudi Arabia and all but solved the North Korea nuclear crisis. He attacks his perceived enemies with abandon, falsely accusing Clinton of colluding with the Russians, former FBI Director James B. Comey of leaking classified information and Democrats of seeking to let undocumented immigrants swamp the U.S. borders. The president often makes statements that are disconnected from his policies. He said his administration did not have a family separation policy on the border, when it did. Then he said the policy was required because of existing laws, when it was not.

The president also simply invents faux facts. He repeatedly said U.S. Steel is building six to eight new steel plants, but that's not true. He said that as president, Obama gave citizenship to 2,500 Iranians during the nuclear-deal negotiations, but that's false. Over and over, Trump claimed that the Uzbekistan-born man who in 2017 was accused of killing eight people with a pickup truck in New York brought two dozen relatives to the United States through "chain migration." The real number is zero.

In one of his more preposterous statements of 2018, Trump labeled the Palm Beach Post as "fake news" for blaming him for traffic jams across the nation -- when an article about the effect of low gas prices on driving habits never mentioned his name. Sometimes, Trump simply attempts to create his own reality.

When leaders attending the U.N. General Assembly burst into laughter when Trump uttered a favorite false claim -- that his administration had accomplished more in less than two years than "almost any administration in the history of our country" -- the president was visibly startled and remarked that he "didn't expect that reaction." But then he later falsely insisted to reporters that the boast "was meant to get some laughter." In an October interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump emphatically denied he had imposed many tariffs. "I mean, other than some tariffs on steel -- which is actually small, what do we have? . . . Where do we have tariffs? We don't have tariffs anywhere," he insisted. The newspaper responded by printing a list of $305 billion worth of tariffs on many types of U.S. imports. Trump exaggerates when the facts are on his side.

He routinely touts a job-growth number that dates from his election, not when he took office, thus inflating it by 600,000 jobs. And although there's no question Trump can draw supporters to his rallies by the thousands, he often claims pumped-up numbers that have no basis in fact. At a Tampa rally, he declared that "thousands of people" who could not get in were watching outside on a "tremendous movie screen." Neither a crowd of that size nor the movie screen existed. The president even includes references to The Fact Checker in his dubious remarks. On Oct. 18, in Missoula, Mont., Trump falsely said that no one challenges his description of the Democrats as the party of crime. "Democrats have become the party of crime. It's true. Who would believe you could say that and nobody even challenges it. Nobody's ever challenged it," he said. But then he had an unusual moment of doubt. "Maybe they have. Who knows? I have to always say that, because then they'll say they did actually challenge it, and they'll put like -- then they'll say he gets a Pinocchio."





President Trump has made more than 10,000 false or misleading claims

By Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly / WaPo / 29Apr2019
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/29/president-trump-has-made-more-than-false-or-misleading-claims/?utm_term=.c4081dc4805c

It took President Trump 601 days to top 5,000 false and misleading claims in The Fact Checker's database, an average of eight claims a day.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/?utm_term=.9a993df1e2d8

But on April 26, just 226 days later, the president crossed the 10,000 mark -- an average of nearly 23 claims a day in this seven-month period, which included the many rallies he held before the midterm elections, the partial government shutdown over his promised border wall and the release of the special counsel's report on Russian interference in the presidential election.

This milestone appeared unlikely when The Fact Checker first started this project during his first 100 days. In the first 100 days, Trump averaged less than five claims a day, which would have added up to about 7,000 claims in a four-year presidential term. But the tsunami of untruths just keeps looming larger and larger.

As of April 27, including the president's rally in Green Bay, Wis., the tally in our database stands at 10,111 claims in 828 days.
In recent days, the president demonstrated why he so quickly has piled up the claims. There was a 45-minute telephone interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News on April 25: 45 claims.

There was an eight-minute gaggle with reporters the morning of April 26: eight claims. There was a speech to the National Rifle Association: 24 claims. There was 19-minute interview with radio host Mark Levin: 17 claims. And, finally, there was the campaign rally on April 27: 61 claims. The president's constant Twitter barrage also adds to his totals. All told, the president racked up 171 false or misleading claims in just three days, April 25-27. That's more than he made in any single month in the first five months of his presidency.

About one-fifth of the president's claims are about immigration issues, a percentage that has grown since the government shutdown over funding for his promised border wall. In fact, his most repeated claim -- 160 times -- is that his border wall is being built. Congress balked at funding the concrete wall he envisioned, and so he has tried to pitch bollard fencing and repairs of existing barriers as "a wall." Trump's penchant for repeating false claims is demonstrated by the fact that The Fact Checker database has recorded nearly 300 instances when the president has repeated a variation of the same claim at least three times. He also now has earned 21 "Bottomless Pinocchios," claims that have earned Three or Four Pinocchios and which have been repeated at least 20 times.

Trump's campaign rallies continue to be a rich source of misstatements and falsehoods, accounting for about 22 percent of the total. The rally in Green Bay on April 27 was little different, with claims that covered a range of issues:
-- He exaggerated the size of trade deficits with Japan, China and the European Union and falsely claimed the United States loses money from such deficits.
-- He said he had "nothing to hide" from the Russia investigation but refused to testify under oath.
-- He continued his practice of inflating the jobs created under his administration by starting the count from the election, not his inauguration.
-- He launched a series of exaggerated or false attacks on Democrats, including claiming the Green New Deal will require every building in Manhattan be replaced (no) and saying Democrats support the killing of healthy babies that have been born (no).
-- He overstated the possible impact of the new trade agreement with Canada and Mexico in myriad ways and trashed the North American Free Trade Agreement, even though the differences are modest.
-- He took credit for funding a program -- the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative -- his administration tried to eliminate.
-- He made a series of false claims about immigration, such as "open borders bring tremendous crime" (there is no documented link between illegal immigration and crime).
-- He claimed he passed the biggest tax cut in history (no) and he said he had cut the estate tax to "zero" (no).
-- He said he was one vote away from repealing Obamacare (no).
-- He falsely said the United States paid for "almost 100 percent" of NATO (no), that Saudi Arabia inked $450 billion in deals with the Trump administration (no) and even that the United States subsidizes the Saudi military (U.S. aid amounts to $10,000 a year).
-- He even claimed that he insisted the new embassy in Jerusalem be made of Jerusalem stone even though ever since the British mandate in then-Palestine, municipal laws have required that all buildings must be faced with this local form of limestone that has a warm, golden hue.

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AP fact check: Trump exaggerates scope of cease-fire deal

The Associated Press October 21, 2019 4:28 a.m.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2019/10/21/ap-fact-check-trump-exaggerates-scope-of-ceasefire-deal

As President Trump describes it, the U.S. swooped into an intractable situation in the Middle East, achieved an agreement within hours that had eluded the world for years and delivered a "great day for civilization."

It was a mission-accomplished moment that other Republican leaders, Democrats and much of the world found unconvincing.

Trump spent much of the past week trying to justify his decision to pull U.S. troops away from America's Kurdish allies in Syria, leaving those Kurdish fighters vulnerable on several fronts and already reeling from attacks by Turkish forces.

In the process, Trump exaggerated the scope of a deal bringing a temporary cease-fire to Turkish-Kurdish hostilities, falsely suggested that U.S. troops in Syria will come home and mischaracterized the history of the conflict and even the geography of it.

___

A look at his rhetoric on that topic and other subjects over the past week:

Syria

TRUMP: "It's time to bring our soldiers back home." -- news conference Wednesday.

THE FACTS: That's not what he's doing.

While the U.S. has begun what the Pentagon calls a deliberate withdrawal of troops from Syria, Trump himself has said that the 200 to 300 U.S. service members deployed to a southern Syria outpost in Al-Tanf will remain there.

And on Saturday, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said the current plan calls for all U.S. troops who are leaving Syria to go to western Iraq, not home. They number more than 700.

Asked Sunday why troops weren't coming home as Trump said they would, his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, said: "Well, they will eventually."

___

TRUMP: "This is a great day for civilization. I am proud of the United States for sticking by me in following a necessary, but somewhat unconventional, path.   People have been trying to make this 'Deal" for many years. Millions of lives will be saved. Congratulations to ALL!" -- tweet Thursday.

TRUMP: "A lot of things are in that agreement that nobody ever thought possible." -- remarks at Dallas rally Thursday.

THE FACTS: The agreement he is hailing is not nearly as consequential to the prospects for peace as he claims. It provides for s five-day cease-fire in the Turks' deadly attacks on Kurdish fighters in northern Syria, which began after Trump announced he would withdraw U.S. troops.

The agreement requires the Kurds to vacate a swath of territory in Syria along the Turkish border in an arrangement that codifies nearly all of Turkey's stated goals in the conflict and relieves it of U.S. sanctions.

It imposes no apparent long-term consequences for Turkey's move against the Kurds, important U.S. partners in the fight against the Islamic State group. Trump calls that fight a mission accomplished despite the U.S. officials' fears of an IS resurgence.

___

TRUMP, on the Syrian areas of Turkish-Kurdish conflict: "It's a lot of sand. They've got a lot of sand over there. So there's a lot of sand that they can play with." -- remarks Wednesday.

THE FACTS: The area of conflict is not known for being particularly sandy. In contrast to Trump's imagery of arid, worthless land that other countries -- not the U.S. -- should fight over, it's actually the breadbasket of Syria.

The area is part of what was historically known as the Fertile Crescent, where settled farming and early civilizations first began.

__

TRUMP: "We were supposed to be in Syria for one month. That was 10 years ago." -- news conference Wednesday.

THE FACTS: Previous administrations never set a one-month timeline for U.S. involvement in Syria.

The U.S.-led coalition began airstrikes on Islamic State militants in Syria in September 2014. About a year later, the Pentagon said teams of special operations forces began going into Syria to conduct raids and start efforts to partner with the Kurdish forces.

Then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter made it clear to Congress at that time that the Pentagon was ready to expand operations with the Kurds and would continue to do so as needed to battle IS, without setting a specific deadline.

___

TRUMP: "Our soldiers are mostly gone from the area." -- news conference Wednesday.

THE FACTS: They're mostly still there.

Close to 30 U.S. troops moved out of two outposts near the border area where the Turkish attack was initially centered. But the bulk of the roughly 1,000 U.S. troops deployed to Syria are still in the country.

According to officials, most of the U.S. troops have largely been consolidated into a few locations in the north, including an airfield facility in the western part of the country known as the Kobani landing zone. A couple hundred have left in recent days with military equipment, and officials say the withdrawal will take weeks.

___

Women in space

TRUMP: "This is the first time for a woman outside of the Space Station. ... They're conducting the first-ever female spacewalk to replace an exterior part of the Space Station." -- speaking to flight engineers Jessica Meir and Christina Koch outside the International Space Station in a teleconference Friday.

THE FACTS: Meir corrected the record, telling Trump: "First of all, we don't want to take too much credit, because there have been many other female spacewalkers before us.   This is just the first time that there have been two women outside at the same time. "

__

Ammunition

TRUMP: "When I first got in, a general told me we could have had a conflict with someone. Said, Sir, we don't have ammunition. And I said I never want to hear a president -- I just never want to hear somebody have that statement made to them again as president of the United States. We don't have ammunition. Think of how bad. Now we have so much ammunition we don't know what to do with it." -- Dallas rally Thursday.

THE FACTS: Trump periodically quotes unidentified generals as saying things that he wants to hear and that are hard to imagine them actually having said. This is no exception.   The U.S. doesn't go to war without sufficient ammunition.

At most, budget constraints may have restricted ammunition for certain training exercises at times and held back the development of new forms of firepower.   It's not unusual for generals to want more people and equipment at their disposal than they have. But they don't run out of bullets.

___

Economy and Trade

TRUMP: "Just out: MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME IS AT THE HIGHEST POINT EVER, EVER, EVER! How about saying it this way, IN THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY!" -- tweet Tuesday.

THE FACTS: Another way of saying it is that median household income has been this high before.

Trump also builds his boast on the records of others.

In the Census Bureau's definitive annual report on income and poverty, it found that median household income in 2018 matched the previous peak of $63,200, in inflation-adjusted dollars, reached in 1999.

While that was a welcome increase after household income fell sharply in the Great Recession, it also suggests that the median American household went back to where it was 19 years ago. (The median is the point where half of households earn more and half earn less).

Household income began rising in 2014, after falling in the aftermath of the recession, and jumped 5.1 percent in 2015, making its most significance gains in President Barack Obama's second term.

It grew just 0.9 percent in 2018, the slowest in three years. The Census Bureau says its data is difficult to compare with previous years because it changed its methods in 2013.

It released a supplemental report showing that, adjusted for those methodological changes, median incomes in 2018 matched those in 1999. A separate census report, which has fewer details on incomes, said last month that median household income has reached a record high, but those data only go back to 2005.

___

TRUMP, on a World Trade Organization ruling allowing the U.S. to tax impose tariffs on $7.5 billion worth of European imports annually: "I think the WTO award has been testament to a lot of good work by the Trump administration. We never won with the WTO, or essentially never won. Very seldom did we win. And now we're winning a lot." -- remarks Wednesday before meeting with Italy's president.

TRUMP: "We didn't win anything for years practically. Now we've won a lot of cases. You know why? Because they know I'll leave if they don't treat us fairly." -- Dallas rally Thursday.

THE FACTS: He's incorrect to say the U.S. never or rarely got any WTO victories under other presidents.

The U.S. has always had a high success rate when it pursues cases against other countries at the WTO. In 2017, trade analyst Daniel Ikenson of the libertarian Cato Institute found that the U.S. had won 91 percent of time it brought a complaint that ended up being adjudicated by the Geneva-based trade monitor.   True, Ikenson noted, the countries bringing complaints tend to win overwhelmingly.   That's because they don't bother going to the WTO in the first place if they don't have a pretty strong case.

The WTO announcement culminated a 15-year fight over EU subsidies for Airbus -- a fight that began long before Trump was in office.

___

TRUMP: "MORE PEOPLE WORKING TODAY IN THE USA THAN AT ANY TIME IN HISTORY!" -- tweet Tuesday.

THE FACTS: True, but it's due to population growth, not just steady hiring.

A more relevant measure is the proportion of Americans with jobs, and that is still far below record highs.

According to Labor Department data , 61 percent of people in the United States 16 years and older were working in September.   That's below the all-time high of 64.7 percent in April 2000, though higher than the 59.9 percent when Trump was inaugurated in January 2017.





Trump tells a damnable and murderous lie

By Dana Milbank, Columnist / WaPo / April 17, 2020

"It would have been so easy to be truthful."
Thus spake President Trump this week on the very day he surpassed the milestone of uttering 18,000 falsehoods during his presidency, as tallied by the Post's Fact Checker.   But on this day, Trump was not admitting to losing his own struggle with the truth. He was accusing the World Health Organization of "covering up the spread of the coronavirus" and failing to "share information in a timely and transparent fashion."   He declared he was cutting off funding for the world's public health body in the middle of a pandemic.

Click here for the rest of the article





President Trump made 19,127 false or misleading claims in 1,226 days

By Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly / WaPo / June 1, 2020

It's no longer a question as to whether President Trump will exceed 20,000 false or misleading claims by the time his current term is completed.   Instead, we have to ask: Will he top 25,000?

As of May 29, his 1,226th day in office, Trump had made 19,127 false or misleading claims, according to the Fact Checker's database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement he has uttered.   That's almost 16 claims a day over the course of his presidency.   So far this year, he's averaging just over 22 claims a day, similar to the pace he set in 2019.

With 235 days to go in his current term, that would leave him just short of 25,000.   But we have also found that October is a dangerous month for the truth, especially if an election is nearing. In October 2018, the president tallied 1,205 claims and in October 2019, 1,159 claims.   That's a pace of 40 claims a day.   Much depends, of course, on whether the president is able to return to holding campaign rallies for his most loyal supporters.   At such rallies, the president runs through a list of exaggerated or false claims that easily tops 60 statements a rally.   Since the coronavirus pandemic has more or less shut down the United States, the president has been unable to hold such mass events.   He tried substituting a daily news conference at the White House, with the occasional interview with a friendly host, but it's not quite the same thing.

The coronavirus pandemic has spawned a whole new genre of Trump's falsehoods.   The category in just a few months has reached 800 claims, with his advocacy for hydroxychloroquine as a possible cure, based on minimal and flimsy evidence, already reaching Bottomless Pinocchio status.   It takes at least 20 repeats of a Three- or Four-Pinocchio claim to merit a Bottomless Pinocchio, and there are now 39 entries.   Trump's penchant for repeating false claims is demonstrated by the fact that the Fact Checker database has recorded more than 450 instances in which he has repeated a variation of the same claim at least three times.

Trump's most repeated claim -- 334 times -- is that the U.S. economy today is the best in history.   He began making this claim in June 2018, and it quickly became one of his favorites.   He's been forced to adapt for the tough economic times, and doing so has made it even more fantastic.   Whereas he used to say it was the best economy in U.S. history, he now often recalls he had achieved "the best economy in the history of the world."

Nope.   The president once could brag about the state of the economy, but he ran into trouble when he made a play for the history books.   By just about any important measure, the pre-coronavirus economy was not doing as well as it did under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson or Bill Clinton -- or Ulysses S. Grant.   Moreover, the economy already was beginning to hit the head winds caused by Trump's trade wars, with the manufacturing sector in an apparent recession.

Trump's second-most repeated claim -- 261 times -- is that his border wall is being built. Congress balked at funding the concrete barrier he envisioned, so the project evolved into the replacement of smaller, older barriers with steel bollard fencing.   (Only three miles of the barrier is on land that previously did not have a barrier.)   The Washington Post has reported the bollard fencing is easily breached, with smugglers sawing through it, despite Trump's claims it is impossible to get past.   Nevertheless, the project has diverted billions in military and counternarcotics funding to become one of the largest infrastructure projects in U.S. history, seizing private land, cutting off wildlife corridors and disrupting Native American cultural sites.

Trump has falsely said 206 times that he passed the biggest tax cut in history.   Even before his tax cut was crafted, he promised it would be the biggest in U.S. history -- bigger than President Ronald Reagan's in 1981. Reagan's tax cut amounted to 2.9 percent of the gross domestic product, and none of the proposals under consideration came close to that level. Yet Trump persisted in this fiction even when the tax cut was eventually crafted to be the equivalent of 0.9 percent of gross domestic product, making it the eighth-largest tax cut in 100 years.   This continues to be an all-purpose applause line at the president's rallies.   The award-winning database website, created by graphics reporter Leslie Shapiro, has an extremely fast search engine that will quickly locate suspect statements the president has made.   We encourage readers to explore it in detail.

Readers may also be interested in our new book, which will be published June 2 by Scribner: "Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President's Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies."   We drew on the database to compile a guide to Trump's most frequently used misstatements, biggest whoppers, and most dangerous deceptions.   We examine in detail about how Trump misleads about himself and his foes, the economy, immigration, the Ukraine controversy, foreign policy, the coronavirus crisis and many other issues.

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Trump may be no good at leading America – but he's really, really good at lying

By Richard Wolffe / The Guardian / Tue 14 Jul 2020
Click here for the whole article

It's outrageous to say that Donald Trump is good at nothing.
He may be no good at leading the country through a pandemic and recession.   He may be no good at healing a nation that is deeply scarred by racist power.   He may be no good at diplomacy with his allies, or even recognising America's enemies for what they are.

But he is really, really good at lying.   An Olympic-standard, Guinness Book of Records fabricator of falsehoods.   He regurgitates lies as rapidly and copiously as Joey Chestnut swallows hotdogs.

Trump represents the historic high-water mark for verbal cheating, which is surely the only part of his short legacy that will feature in US history exams in 2030.   According to the exhausted and exhaustive factchecking team at the Washington Post, Trump's rate of lying is shaped remarkably like the country's exponential rise in Covid-19 cases.   It took him 827 days to reach his first 10,000 lies, but just 440 days to reach his second 10,000 lies.




President Trump has made more than 20,000 false or misleading claims

By Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly / WaPo / July 13, 2020

It took President Trump 827 days to top 10,000 false and misleading claims in The Fact Checker's database, an average of 12 claims a day.
But on July 9, just 440 days later, the president crossed the 20,000 mark — an average of 23 claims a day over a 14-month period, which included the events leading up to Trump's impeachment trial, the worldwide pandemic that crashed the economy and the eruption of protests over the death of George Floyd in police custody.   The coronavirus pandemic has spawned a whole new genre of Trump's falsehoods. The category in just a few months has reached nearly 1,000 claims, more than his tax claims combined. Trump's false or misleading claims about the impeachment investigation — and th   e events surrounding it — contributed almost 1,200 entries to the database. The notion that Trump would exceed 20,000 claims before he finished his term appeared ludicrous when The Fact Checker started this project during the president's first 100 days in office.   In that time, Trump averaged fewer than five claims a day, which would have added up to about 7,000 claims in a four-year presidential term.   But the tsunami of untruths just keeps looming larger and larger.

As of July 9, the tally in our database stands at 20,055 claims in 1,267 days. Just as when Trump crossed the 10,000 threshold, an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News helped Trump breach the 20,000 mark.   Trump racked up 62 claims on July 9, about half of which came during the Hannity interview: Trump's statements cover a substantial range of his bogus attacks, conspiracy theories, boasts and inaccurate information:
— Former president Barack Obama "did not want" to give surplus military equipment to police.   Obama scaled back the program but still allowed specialized firearms, manned and unmanned aircraft, explosives and riot gear.
— Trump has "tremendous support" in the African American community.   No polling shows this.
— Trump "insisted" the National Guard be used in Minneapolis to quell disturbances and Seattle officials "knew" he was ready to act with force if the city did not shut down protests.   Local officials say neither claim is true; they acted on their own.
— The United States has a "record" for coronavirus testing, and China has not tested as many people as the United States.   The United States still lags several major countries in terms of tests per million people, the best metric for comparison.   The United States has a higher per capita testing rate than China, but China in June said it had tested 90 million people — at the time, three times as many as the United States.
— Obama and former vice president Joe Biden "spied" on his campaign and "knew everything that was going on."   Trump has made allegations of Obama spying since 2017, based on little or no evidence.
— The jury forewoman in the Roger Stone trial was "disgraceful."   The judge in the case rejected claims of bias.   Tomeka Hart's political leanings and activities were clearly known during the jury selection process, and not even Stone's legal team tried to strike her from the jury pool.
— Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, was placed in "solitary confinement," while Al Capone "was never in solitary confinement."   Manafort was in a "private, self-contained living unit" that was larger than other units, which included a bathroom, shower, telephone and laptop access, according to court records.   Capone was eventually sent to the infamous Alcatraz prison, where he was stabbed and got into fights and, according to some reports, ended up in solitary confinement as his brain deteriorated from untreated syphilis.
— "We're doing record numbers on the border."   In 2020, no records have been set, and border apprehensions spiked sharply in June.
— "We've rebuilt the military, 2.5 trillion dollars."   Trump frequently suggests this money is all for new equipment, but he's just adding together three years of budgets, none of which is a record.

So far during his presidency, Trump's most repeated claim — 360 times — is that the U.S. economy today is the best in history.   He began making this claim in June 2018, and it quickly became one of his favorites.   He's been forced to adapt for the tough economic times, and doing so has made it even more fantastic.   Whereas he used to say it was the best economy in U.S. history, he now often recalls that he achieved "the best economy in the history of the world."   That's not true.   The president once could brag about the state of the economy, but he ran into trouble when he made a play for the history books.   By just about any important measure, the pre-coronavirus economy was not doing as well as it did under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson or Bill Clinton — or Ulysses S. Grant.   Moreover, the economy was already beginning to hit the head winds caused by Trump's trade wars, with the manufacturing sector in an apparent recession.   Trump has repeated this "best economy" claim more than 100 times just since the coronavirus emerged in China and sent the economy into a tailspin, robbing Trump of what he had expected would be his top sales pitch for reelection.

Trump's second-most repeated claim — 261 times — is that his border wall is being built.   Congress balked at funding the concrete barrier he envisioned, so the project evolved into the replacement of smaller, older barriers with steel bollard fencing.   (Only three miles of the barrier is on land that previously did not have a barrier.)   The Washington Post has reported that the bollard fencing is easily breached, with smugglers sawing through it, despite Trump's claims that it is impossible to get past.   Nevertheless, the project has diverted billions in military and counternarcotics funding to become one of the largest infrastructure projects in U.S. history, seizing private land, cutting off wildlife corridors and disrupting Native American cultural sites.

Trump has falsely said 210 times that he passed the biggest tax cut in history.   Even before his tax cut was crafted, he promised it would be the biggest in U.S. history — bigger than President Ronald Reagan's in 1981.   Reagan's tax cut amounted to 2.9 percent of the gross domestic product, and none of the proposals under consideration came close to that level.   Yet Trump persisted in this fiction even when the tax cut was eventually crafted to be the equivalent of 0.9 percent of GDP, making it the eighth-largest tax cut in 100 years.   This continues to be an all-purpose applause line at the president's rallies.   Trump's penchant for repeating false claims is demonstrated by the fact that the Fact Checker database has recorded nearly 500 instances in which he has repeated a variation of the same claim at least three times.

The Fact Checker also tracks Three- or Four-Pinocchio claims that Trump has said at least 20 times, earning him a Bottomless Pinocchio.   There are now 40 entries, with the most recent addition being his false claim that he has spent $2.5 trillion on new military equipment.   The award-winning database website, created by graphics reporter Leslie Shapiro, has an extremely fast search engine that will quickly locate suspect statements the president has made.   We encourage readers to explore it in detail.

Readers may also be interested in our new book, which was published June 2 by Scribner: "Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President's Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies."   We drew on the database to compile a guide to Trump's most frequently used misstatements, biggest whoppers and most dangerous deceptions.   We examine in detail how Trump misleads about himself and his foes, the economy, immigration, the Ukraine controversy, foreign policy, the coronavirus crisis and many other issues.   The book is a national bestseller and earned a starred review from Kirkus Reviews, which called it "an extremely valuable chronicle."





Final Tally: 30,573 false or misleading claims

Four years of Trump falsehoods | Fact Checker
January 23, 2021 | 4:38 PM MST
The Fact Checker counted a total of 30,573 false or misleading claims made by President Trump during his White House tenure.

Click here to see what we learned.

Perhaps, Thomas Jefferson's quote is appropriate: "He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it the second time."