Trump averages 5.6 lies per
day
"It's scary to have a
president who lies so brazenly and who seems out-of-touch with fundamental
reality."
"All governments lie,"
as the saying goes, but Donald Trump appears to have taken presidential lying
to new heights during just his first year in the White House.
According to an ongoing analysis by
the Washington Post that has
tracked Trump's formal speeches, Twitter tirades, and impromptu remarks to the
press, the president made 1,950 false or misleading statements during his first
347 days in office. On average, the president says something that is untrue 5.6
times per day.
With just over two weeks left before he reaches the one-year
mark, Trump is on track to surpass 2,000 lies, misleading the public at a far higher rate than
his recent predecessors.
As the Post's database demonstrates, Trump's lies come in a variety of forms and pervade nearly every topic he discusses, from jobs and the stock market to immigration and foreign policy.
The database also makes clear that the president isn't
sufficiently inventive to come up with new lies on a day-to-day basis.
Rather,
he frequently rehashes old ones—Trump has repeated the claim that Obamacare is
"essentially" dead over 50 times, for instance. Trump has also
repeatedly insisted—contradicting all
available evidence—that the tax bill he signed into law last month
will cost him "a fortune."
"Trump repeated the falsehood about having the biggest tax
cut 53 times, even though Treasury Department data shows it would rank
eighth," the Post adds.
"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 lies have come at such a rapid pace, the Post notes, that attempting to track
them all has become a significant strain on the paper's resources. "We
will soon face a decision about whether to maintain [the database] beyond one
year," the analysis
concludes.
The problem, as many analysts have noted, is that Trump's
prodigious lying has had little to no effect on his core base of support.
As The Atlantic's
David Graham noted last year, hardcore supporters of
the president are often unfazed by his false statements. Though Trump backers
are frequently willing to admit when the president says something that is
untrue, their support for him rarely wavers because of his misleading claims.
"They know he's wrong, and they don’t care (that
much)," Graham observed.
In a column for the Philadelphia Daily News on Monday, Will Bunch
warned that Trump's base of support combined with his ability to manipulate the
media raises the "scary" possibility—despite polls showing he is the least popular first-year president in
American history—that he could still win reelection in 2020.
"It's scary to have a president who lies so brazenly and
who seems out-of-touch with fundamental reality," Bunch concluded,
"but it's even scarier to think he could still be doing this from a
presidential perch seven years from now."
