PolitiFact finds that only 1 percent of the things Donald Trump says are entirely true

Only 1 percent of the statements Donald Trump makes are true, according to the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact checking group PolitiFact. Updated as recently as Thursday, over half of Trump's statements were recorded as being lies.

PolitiFact uses six different categories to measure the truthfulness of statements, ranging from "true" to "mostly false" to "pants on fire." Trump's statements were 18 percent "mostly false," 39 percent "false," and 19 percent "pants on fire." President Obama, by comparison, only had 12 percent statements that were "mostly false" and "false" and 2 percent that were "pants on fire."

Of course, it raises the question of how PolitiFact is picking the statements to analyze. According to their website, "Every day, PolitiFact and PunditFact staffers look for statements that can be checked. We comb through speeches, news stories, press releases, campaign brochures, TV ads, Facebook postings and transcripts of TV and radio interviews. Because we can't possibly check all claims, we select the most newsworthy and significant ones."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

PolitiFact lists a number of questions including, "Is the statement likely to be passed on and repeated by others?" In other words, the group is measuring the most significant and high-profile statements — so while Trump might tell the truth more than 1 percent of the time, he's certainly not doing so when it counts the most.

Read all of PolitiFact's Trump fact checks here.