At this point, it's easier to keep track of the things Donald Trump says that are factual as opposed to his seemingly endless lies. You know the old joke, about how you can tell a politician is lying because his mouth is open? It's not a joke when it comes to Trump. In pretty much every statement he made last night, Trump included a lie. One reporter, the Toronto Star's Washington correspondent Daniel Dale, came up with a whopping 33 Trump lies in 40 minutes of talking (a lie for every 1.2 minutes), while finding five from Hillary Clinton.
In real-time fact-checking last night, The New York Times came up with 20 false, misleading, or just iffy Trump statements, to Hillary Clinton's two. Politico counted 13 Trump lies, to Clinton's two.
Here are some of Trump’s many whoppers.
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First, he said he didn't tweet at 5 AM the morning after the first debate that people should check out a "sex tape." He did. Then he trotted out an old and thoroughly debunked the claim that Clinton laughed about the rape of a 12-year-old and got the rapist off. It didn't happen. Third, he said again that it's Clinton who should apologize to President Obama because her campaign started the whole birther thing. It didn't.
Trump also continued to insist that he was against the war in Iraq from the beginning, and that it has never been debunked. So that's a twofer lie—his claim has been debunked, and he wasn't opposed to the war from the beginning. But he's never gonna let that one go. On taxes, he said she's "raising everbody's taxes massively." She's not. He said that the neighbors of San Bernardino shooters had seen "bombs all over the apartment of the people that wounded many, many people" and that "Muslims have to report the problems when they see them." That claim has been debunked, too, though Fox News kept pushing it. Of course.
Trump also said "we have no growth in this country," which Politico counts as his seventh lie (it would be the eighth if you give him two for his Iraq comments). That one's easy, unless you believe in the conspiracy theory that the government is cooking the books on economic activity to get Hillary elected. He also said that we've got the "highest [taxes] in the world." We don't. "Slowest growth since 1929"? See above. On healthcare, "she wants to go to single payer." We could only wish. A public option on the insurance exchange is a good step toward it, one that she is arguing for, but it's a far cry from single payer.
Back in foreign policy, he said ISIS has a "good chunk" of Libya's oil. It doesn't. Then he said that Clinton and Kerry and Obama made Iran "into a powerful nation and a very rich nation." They didn't. It has a per capita GDP "similar to that of Namibia, Angola and Jamaica." That's No. 12 (or 13, but at this point isn't counting kind of absurd?). He also said, again, that "ICE just endorsed me." Last month a union of border control agents endorsed him, which is not ICE. ICE is a federal agency, and it doesn't endorse political candidates.
Politico lists another half-dozen of Trump's claims that are "misleading," from Russia going after ISIS (after he said he knows nothing about Russia) to Clinton and Obama being responsible for the rise of ISIS, to the U.S. having an $800 billion trade deficit. We don't.
Whether it's 19 or 20 or 33 lies from Trump (let’s go with 33, including the bizarre claim that Michelle Obama was in ads attacking Hillary in 2008 and that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died "recently" when it was eight months ago), that is a lot of lies.