Donald Trump has made over 10,000 false or misleading statements since becoming president, the Washington Post’s fact-checker-in-chief has estimated.
Glenn Kessler “has been tracking Trump’s falsehoods since his inauguration” reports The Hill, “and applies ‘Pinocchios’ on a sliding scale from one to four depending on the severity of the lie”.
According to Kessler, Trump has averaged more than 12 false claims per day since becoming president, totalling more than 10,000 in his 828 days in office.
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The rate of false or misleading statements has picked up recently, rising to about 23 untruths a day over the last seven months. Over a three-day period last week alone, the president made 171 such statements.
On Sunday, when Kessler and his team were was still crunching the numbers, they counted 45 falsehoods in his interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity - a rate of one every minute.
“Many of the misstatements are about immigration issues,” says CNN Business, “with distortions and utter falsehoods about migrants, border walls, and Democrats”.
It adds: “Other common bogus claims relate to Robert Mueller's probe, trade talks with other countries, and Trump's accomplishments in office.”
As Trump has become looser with the facts over time, he has ramped up his war against fact-checkers, slamming them as “some of the most dishonest people in media”.
Some of his lies have had potentially dangerous consequences. At his latest campaign rally in Green Bay, the president focused attention on abortion rights.
“The baby is born,” he said. “The mother meets with the doctor. They take care of the baby. They wrap the baby beautifully. And then the doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby.”
The New York Times published a detailed fact-check piece, discrediting the claim, but MSNBC went further. “In an era in which domestic terrorism is an increasingly deadly societal scourge,” it said, “it’s dangerous when a sitting American president lies to rabid followers with tales of infants being executed in medical facilities.”
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