President Donald Trump has been accused of being an arbiter of Fake News which he has been constantly opposed to.
President Donald Trump
Because of summer vacation schedules, we had fallen a month behind
in updating The Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and
tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president.
It turns out that’s when the president decided to turn on the
spigots of false and misleading claims. As of day 558, he’s made 4,229
Trumpian claims — an increase of 978 in just two months.
That’s an overall average of nearly 7.6 claims a day.
When we first started this project for the president’s first 100
days, he averaged 4.9 claims a day. But the average number of claims per
day keeps climbing the longer Trump stays in office. In fact, in June
and July, the president averaged 16 claims a day.
Put another way: In his first year as president, Trump made 2,140
false or misleading claims. Now, just six months later, he has almost
doubled that total.
Our award-winning interactive graphic, created with the help of
Leslie Shapiro and Kaeti Hinck of The Washington Post’s graphics
department, displays a running list of every false or misleading
statement made by Trump. We have updated the graphic to allow readers to
see the number of claims on a daily or monthly basis.
On July 5, the president reached a new daily high of 79 false and
misleading claims. On a monthly basis, June and July rank in first and
second place, with 532 and 446 claims, respectively.
Trump has a proclivity to repeat, over and over, many of his false
or misleading statements. We’ve counted nearly 150 claims that the
president has repeated at least three times, some with breathtaking
frequency.
Almost one third of Trump’s claims — 1,293 — relate to economic
issues, trade deals or jobs. He frequently takes credit for jobs created
before he became president or company decisions with which he had no
role. He cites his “incredible success” in terms of job growth, even
though annual job growth under his presidency has been slower than the
last five years of Barack Obama’s term.
Just on trade, the president has made 432 false or misleading
claims. He frequently gets the size of trade deficits wrong or presents
the numbers in a misleading fashion.
He also indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of economics. In
June and July, more than 20 times the president said some variation of
the claim that the United States “lost” money on trade deficits. Just
about every economist would give a student an “F” for making such a
statement.
A trade deficit simply means people in one country are buying more
goods from another country than people in the second country are buying
from the first. Trade deficits are also affected by macroeconomic
factors, such as the relative strength of currencies, economic growth
rates, and savings and investment rates.
Not surprisingly, immigration is the top single source of Trump’s
misleading claims, now totaling 538. Thirty times just in the past five
months, for instance, the president has falsely claimed his
long-promised border wall with Mexico is being built, even though
Congress has denied funding for it.
But moving up the list quickly are claims about the investigation
into Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether people in the
Trump campaign were in any way connected to it. The president has made
378 statements about the Russia probe, using hyperbolic claims of “worse
than Watergate,” “McCarthyism” and, of course, “witch hunt.” He often
asserts the Democrats colluded with the Russians, even though the
Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign were victims of
Russian activities, as emails were hacked and then released via
WikiLeaks. All told, nearly 160 times the president has made claims
suggesting the Russia probe is made up, a hoax or a fraud.
Misleading claims about taxes — now at 336 — are also a common
feature of Trump’s speeches. Eighty-eight times, he has made the false
assertion that he passed the biggest tax cut in U.S. history.
On foreign policy, the president consistently misstates NATO
spending. More than 60 times, he has falsely said the United States pays
as much as 90 percent of the alliance’s costs and that other NATO
members “owe” money. But he is conflating overall defense spending with
NATO obligations — and the United States, unlike many NATO allies, has
global responsibilities.
We also have catalogued the president’s many flip-flops, since
those earn Upside-Down Pinocchios if a politician shifts position on an
issue without acknowledging that he or she did so.
Given that the president has been in office more than 18 months, we
decided to begin phasing out the listing of his astonishing flip-flop
on the accuracy of the unemployment rate. During the campaign, he
repeatedly claimed that it was a phony number and the real unemployment
rate was really many times higher.
Now, he regularly touts unemployment statistics as proof of his
economic agenda’s success, though he does not always get them right. His
refusal to acknowledge this shift has been frustrating, but even
flip-flops have a statute of limitations.
Source: Washington Post
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