Trump’s lies, misleading claims reach a milestone

According to the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, President Donald Trump has hit the dubious milestone of 10,000 false or misleading claims since he started his presidency. That comes out to an average of 12.2 claims per day, or 10,111 total claims in the 828 days of the Trump presidency covered by the Fact Checker so far.

“The President continues to say false or misleading statements at an unbelievable pace,” said Glenn Kessler, the lead fact checker, on CNN this morning.

According to The Post, the largest issue area of false or misleading claims has been immigration. The most-repeated claim is that the border wall is currently being built, something that Congress has not allocated funding for or authorized construction of. The Post points out that there are portions of the border wall being repaired.

Trump’s campaign rallies are the largest venues for false or misleading claims, constituting 22 percent of all of the claims covered by the Fact Checker. Trump’s rally in Green Bay, Wis.last Saturday spawned 61 claims. For example, Trump said he had cut the estate tax to “zero,” or that he was one vote away from repealing the Affordable Care Act — both claims are untrue.

The Fact Checker aims to “explain difficult issues, provide missing context and provide analysis and explanation of various “code words” used by politicians, diplomats and others to obscure or shade the truth.” Readers are encouraged to submit claims for fact-checking.

George Conway, the husband of White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, weighed in on Twitter, writing “Congrats, #DerangedDonald!! An amazing accomplishment!! No one but you could have achieved this.” Over 12,000 people had retweeted the comment by the time of publication.

Trump has frequently gone after the Washington Post for stories critical of his administration, calling them “fake news” or “Amazon’s ‘chief lobbyist,’” conflating the relationship between the two companies because of the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, who is also the owner and CEO of Amazon.

Spokespeople for both Amazon and the Post have denied this accusation previously and point to the separation between the two companies. Amazon does not own the Washington Post; Jeff Bezos does as an individual.

Read more at usatoday.com.