Unless Donald Trump goes to ground and doesn’t speak publicly, he’s likely to pass the 2,000-lies mark by the end of his first year in the White House. He’s averaging 5.6 “false or misleading claims” a day for a total of 1,950 in 347 days, according to the Washington Post’s count.
That doesn’t mean 1,950 different lies, of course. The top two, at 61 apiece, are that Obamacare is dying of its own accord and that Trump was responsible for business decisions made before he was in office but announced after his inauguration. But those aren’t all:
There are now more than 60 claims that he has repeated three or more times. [...]
With the successful push in Congress to pass a tax plan, two of Trump’s favorite talking points about taxes — that the tax plan will be the biggest tax cut in U.S. history and that the United States is one of the highest-taxed nations — have rapidly moved up the list.
Trump repeated the falsehood about having the biggest tax cut 53 times, even though Treasury Department data shows it would rank eighth. And 58 times Trump has claimed that the United States pays the highest corporate taxes (25 times) or that it is one of the highest-taxed nations (33 times). The latter is false; the former is misleading, as the effective U.S. corporate tax rate (what companies end up paying after deductions and benefits) ends up being lower than the statutory tax rate.
The sheer repetition shows that “lie” is the right word—if you say something untrue dozens of times, it’s because you want the false information out there, not because you made a mistake or didn’t know or misspoke. The man lies. Constantly.
As fond of superlatives as Trump is, you’d think he’d embrace it. He’s always telling us how no president before ever did ______________ or ______________ as much as he did—well, lying is one he could be truthful in claiming.
