President Trump has hit a milestone: He has told more than 3,000 lies in nearly 16 months in office. He has also nearly doubled his average of lies told per day.
According to a tracker kept by the “Washington Post,” Trump hit 3,001 lies on May 1 — and the pace has accelerated markedly in recent days. Since taking office, Trump has told 6.5 lies per day. When the “Post” began tracking falsehoods during the president’s first 100 days, Trump was averaging 4.9 lies a day. In the past two months, Trump that average has increased to 9 lies daily.
Trump has a greatest-hits playlist he turns to time and again. “Trump has a proclivity to repeat, over and over, many of his false or misleading statements. We’ve counted at least 113 claims that the president has repeated at least three times, some with breathtaking frequency,” the paper says. Those include: The claim that Trump passed the biggest tax cut in history (told 72 times) and the assertion that a wall is necessary to stop the flow of drugs from Mexico (told 34 times and rebutted by the DEA). Thirteen times in the past three weeks, Trump has repeatedly stated that “the Wall” is already being built; in reality, Congress wouldn’t give him the funding and nixed the prototypes he had built.
What were Trump’s latest lies?
“Not every day is filled with falsehoods, but the president makes up for his slow days with days that offer an extraordinary number of misleading claims — such as 53 on July 25, 2017, or 49 on Nov. 29, 2017,” the “Post” says. “These are often days when the president has had a series of freewheeling interviews or given a campaign-rally-style speech.”
For example: During Trump’s campaign-style rally in Michigan on Apr. 28, organized as counter-programming to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the president told 44 lies, his third-highest total in a single day. He made false claims about Obamacare, job growth, wage growth, the African-American employment rate, crowd size, the border wall, money “given” to Iran, Chinese imports and former Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, among others.
“Trump lies with zero sense of shame, guilt or remorse,” wrote CNN’s Chris Cillizza in January, when Trump broke the 2,000-lie mark. “Unlike most politicians who, when caught in a falsehood or a lie, won’t repeat it again for fear of the blowback, Trump seems to revel in saying things that have been proven not to be true.”
