Congratulations? We're still standing, anyway, however damaged. But the institution of the American presidency and the electoral system may never recover from this. In 355 days, the current occupier of the Oval Office has uttered—conservatively—2001 lies. That's the sober, and sobering, calculation by the Washington Post's fact-checking team.
With just 10 days before he finishes his first year as president, Trump has made 2,001 false or misleading claims in 355 days, according to our database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president. That’s an average of more than 5.6 claims a day.
When we started this project, originally aimed at the president’s first 100 days, he averaged 4.9 claims a day. At that pace, it appeared unlikely the president would break 2,000 in a year. But the longer the president has been in the job, the more frequently he touts an assortment of exaggerated, dubious or false claims. (Our full interactive graphic can be found here.) [...]
We also track the president’s flip-flops on our list, as they are so glaring. He spent the 2016 campaign telling supporters that the unemployment rate was really 42 percent and the official statistics were phony; now, on 47 occasions he has hailed the lowest unemployment rate in 17 years. It was already very low when he was elected—4.6 percent, the lowest in a decade—so his failure to acknowledge that is misleading.
An astonishing 91 times, Trump has celebrated a rise in the stock market—even though in the campaign he repeatedly said it was a “bubble” that was ready to crash as soon as the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates. Well, the Fed has raised rates four times since the election—and yet the stock market has not plunged as Trump predicted. It has continued a rise in stock prices that began under President Barack Obama in 2009. Again, Trump has never explained his shift in position on the stock market, making his consistent cheerleading misleading.
They note that he is a broken record with many of these, that he has repeated 70 of his lies at least three times, many of them having to do with his border wall and immigration obsessions, particularly a variation on a lie he repeated at Tuesday's immigration meeting: "We have tremendous numbers of people and drugs pouring into our country. So in order to secure [the border] we need a wall."
But immigration doesn't crack his top two obsessions for his lies. The Post has a tie for his top two favorite things to lie about, each (as of publication time—he spoke again before Wednesday's cabinet meeting, so this is subject to change by the minute) repeated 61 times. One is a variation on the theme that "Obamacare is essentially dead." It's not. The other is taking credit for economic success and business achievements that happened before him or had nothing to do with him. "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."
On Wednesday he was back at it, speaking from "the studio," in previous administrations known as the "Cabinet Room," and issuing at least a dozen new and old whoppers relating to all of the above. The White House is going to have to stop trotting him out in public to prove that he is indeed mentally stable.