The rate of lies doubled as soon as Trump began the Ukraine shake-down and the Mueller Report was thwarted.
Try to remember the lies of the Obama administration, just as a simple comparison.
In a related development, Trump is now gaining on a lock for being the worst POTUS in history, even as Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan are the perennial worst.
It took President Trump 827 days to top 10,000 false and misleading claims in The Fact Checker’s database, an average of 12 claims a day.
But on July 9, just 440 days later, the president crossed the 20,000 mark — an average of 23 claims a day over a 14-month period, which included the events leading up to Trump’s impeachment trial, the worldwide pandemic that crashed the economy and the eruption of protests over the death of George Floyd in police custody.
The coronavirus pandemic has spawned a whole new genre of Trump’s falsehoods. The category in just a few months has reached nearly 1,000 claims, more than his tax claims combined. Trump’s false or misleading claims about the impeachment investigation — and the events surrounding it — contributed almost 1,200 entries to the database.
The notion that Trump would exceed 20,000 claims before he finished his term appeared ludicrous when The Fact Checker started this project during the president’s first 100 days in office. In that time, Trump averaged fewer than five claims a day, which would have added up to about 7,000 claims in a four-year presidential term. But the tsunami of untruths just keeps looming larger and larger.
Trump’s penchant for repeating false claims is demonstrated by the fact that the Fact Checker database has recorded nearly 500 instances in which he has repeated a variation of the same claim at least three times.
The Fact Checker also tracks Three- or Four-Pinocchio claims that Trump has said at least 20 times, earning him a Bottomless Pinocchio. There are now 39 entries.
The average (ranking) for presidents who did not win a second term is 30th. That's well below average. None of the presidents who didn't have a second term ranked higher than 13th (John Kennedy, who was assassinated). The worst was last overall (Buchanan).
Just on this basis alone, you'd think that Trump would probably go down as below average if he lost in November. We wouldn't know quite where he'd land, but it'd be a pretty good bet that he wouldn't finish in the top half.
I'd bet Trump would dip even lower given where the historians already have him. The average of the APSA and Siena polls put Trump at 43rd, which ties him for last with Buchanan.