The official count of Trump lies is nearing a new benchmark. President Trump has made nearly 2,000 false statements in his first year as president.
According to the Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog, Trump has made 1,950 false or misleading claims in the 347 days since he was sworn in on January 20, 2017 — an average of 5.6 per day.
At this, Trump has been working overtime during the holidays: The Post counted 24 untruths in Trump’s 30-minute interview with the New York Times at his Mar-a-Lago resort on December 28. At this rate, he’ll cross the 2,000 mark sometime next week.
Trump’s two most-repeated lies, with 61 tellings each, are the following:
• The Affordable Care Act is dying or essentially dead. “The Congressional Budget Office has said that the Obamacare exchanges, despite well-documented issues, are not imploding and are expected to remain stable for the foreseeable future,” says the Post. “Indeed, healthy enrollment for the coming year has surprised health-care experts.”
• Taking credit for events or business decisions that happened before he took office. “Sixty-one times, he has touted that he secured business investments and job announcements that had been previously announced and could easily be found with a Google search,” the Post says.
Some of the false statements Trump made in the Times interview:
• “Virtually every Democrat has said there is no collusion. There is no collusion. . . . I saw Dianne Feinstein the other day on television saying there is no collusion.” The Senator from California actually said on CNN that she had not seen evidence “so far” that the Trump campaign was given emails by Russia.
• “I think it’s been proven that there is no collusion.” In actuality, members of the Trump campaign interacted with Russians 31 times during the campaign. “There are at least 19 known meetings, in addition to the indictments or guilty pleas of his campaign manager, national security adviser and others,” the Post notes.
• “There was tremendous collusion on behalf of the Russians and the Democrats. There was no collusion with respect to my campaign.” There is no evidence of this. The Post calls it a “breathtakingly false” statement.
Despite the increased scrutiny and stepped-up fact-checking, often in real time, the president shows no sign of slowing down. “The conclusion here is a simple one: Trump lies with zero sense of shame, guilt or remorse,” writes Chris Cillizza of CNN. “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.”
