# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
ABC late night host Jimmy Kimmel helpfully tried to offer his viewers some real-world scale that would capture the astounding amount of lies President Donald Trump has told after three years in office.

Kimmel's bit was tied to Monday's Washington Post "Fact Checker" column, which updated its running tally of Trump's false or misleading claims to mark the third anniversary of his inauguration. The new total, per the Post, equals a staggering total of 16,241 lies. Even more notable, the frequency and volume of Trump's lies have increased each year, from 1,999 false or misleading claims in 2017 to 5,689 in 2018 to a mind-blowing 8,155 lies last year.

"And that's just in public," Kimmel snarked. "That doesn't even include the time he told Don Jr. he loves him."

"In 2019, Trump averaged an incredible 22 false claims per day," Kimmel pointed out. "And can you imagine how much higher that would be if he didn't have chicken stuffed in his mouth all the time?"

"Even the color of his face is a lie," Kimmel joked. "There are so many lies, it's hard to even comprehend that number. So I thought it might help to see it. We have 16,241 lies. To put that into perspective, that's over 7,000 more lies than there are visible stars in the night sky."

"If those lies were fluffy buttermilk pancakes, one-inch thick, they would stack up higher than the Empire State Building."

"If Donald Trump's lies were cruise ship passengers, they would fill six Titanic s and a whole bunch of dinghies too. If those 16,000 lies were Big Macs, you'd have enough two all-beef patties with special sauce, lettuce, cheese to bury the president in a pile 10 feet high in the East Room of the White House."

"So there you have it," Kimmel summed up. "Sixteen thousand lies and a side order of fries from our president."
Watch the video above, via ABC. Have a tip we should know? [email protected]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Jimmy Kimmel Illustrates 3 Years of President Trump's Lies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
ABC late night host Jimmy Kimmel helpfully tried to offer his viewers some real-world scale that would capture the astounding amount of lies President Donald Trump has told after three years in office. Kimmel's bit was tied to Monday's Washington Post "Fact Checker" column, which updated its running tally of Trump's false or misleading claims to mark the third anniversary of his inauguration.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It never ceases to amaze that it wasn't until Donald Trump came onto the scene that liberals in the national media discovered the concept of "lying."

Thomas Edsall, typically the only columnist at the New York Times worth a damn, had an entire piece on Wednesday suggesting that - can you believe it? - politicians lie and voters know it!

What's more, Trump as president has demonstrated that voters don't care!

"A large segment of the American electorate has come to tolerate, and in many cases to willingly accept, politicians who lie," wrote Edsall. "Double talk is key to Trump's governing strategy."

The idea that Trump lied his way into the White House and that he's lying his way into a second term is a media fantasy.

If anything, Trump isn't the reason millions of people are supposedly unbothered by lies. He's the effect of years of the national media lying with impunity.

They're always lying or instigating or inducing panic for no other reason than that it pays to keep readers and viewers in a constant state of anxiety.

Well, Trump was the relief to that sick cycle because though he does lie, nearly always about the most inconsequential things, he at least doesn't screw everyone over by hobbling economic opportunity and snatching away their insurance under the guise of "expanding access to healthcare."

When politicians do those things, the media react with a yawn. Yeah, too bad, but that's how it goes!

But if Trump says something like "there's a crisis at the border," liberal journalists are horrified, absolutely horrified, that he would ever tell such a lie, though right up until that moment, they themselves had been calling it a crisis.

It's as if they don't think people can actually see for themselves that there really are hundreds of thousands of poor people from broken countries dumping themselves into the United States, where we're expected to care for them.

No crisis there! Just Trump lying again!

The "Trump lies again" mantra is in itself an attempt by the media to mislead us. That ridiculous tally by the Washington Post and the New York Times purporting to track something like 1 billion lies told by the president every minute is simply a joke.

Edsall cited the Washington Post's version in his column, so let's take a look at it. Here's an example of one of the "false or misleading claims" by Trump included in the list: "In many ways, this is the greatest economy in the HISTORY of America."

The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler determined that to be a lie because, he said, "by just about any important measure, the economy today is not doing as well as it did under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson or Bill Clinton - or Ulysses S. Grant."

My God, impeach! The president shared an opinion that I didn't agree with! (Never mind that gross domestic product is higher than it's ever been).

President Barack Obama in 2010 warned that we might be in a "new normal" in which unemployment remained high and companies simply refused to hire because "they've learned to do more with less." New York Times liberal columnist Paul Krugman every week endorsed that mindset, championed Obama, and then said with complete certitude that Trump, if elected, would cause an irreparable global recession.

Krugman in August 2015: "Persistent global weakness is the new normal."

Now, Krugman is admitting that, well, the economy is actually doing very well under this president. There are more jobs, unemployment is stunningly low, and companies are expanding.

So, who "lied" to the public? Was it Trump when he said we have the "greatest economy in the HISTORY of America," or was it Krugman, who told us to accept the "new normal" that Obama believed in?

If Edsall is concerned about Trump taking advantage of voters who now accept lying as a matter of everyday politics, he doesn't need to look at the president to figure out why. He needs to look at his own industry.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Trump's 'lies' are nothing compared to the media's

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It never ceases to amaze that it wasn't until Donald Trump came onto the scene that liberals in the national media discovered the concept of "lying." Thomas Edsall, typically the only columnist at the New York Times worth a damn, had an entire piece on Wednesday suggesting that - can you believe it?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
President Trump has made 16,241 false or misleading claims during his three years in office, according to The Washington Post's Fact Checker.

In 2019, Trump reportedly more than doubled the number of false or misleading claims he made compared to his first two years in office combined. Trump made 8,155 suspect claims in 2019, surpassing his 7,688 from 2017 and 2018 combined, the newspaper reported.

It added that the president averaged more than 22 false or misleading claims a day in 2019.

Nearly 1,000 of the false and misleading claims last year dealt with Trump's comments about the investigation into his dealings with Ukraine, which were the subject of his impeachment, according to the Post. Nearly 70 times, Trump claimed a whistleblower complaint about his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was inaccurate. The Post, however, notes the report captured the content of the call and other details of the report have been confirmed.

The Post added that the president claimed nearly 100 times that his phone call with Zelensky was "perfect," a claim deemed false or misleading due to alarms raised by White House officials.

Other common false and misleading claims are about economy or jobs, which the Post's Fact Checker found made up one in five of Trump's suspect comments. About one in six are about immigration, according to the Post.

Nearly 20 percent of Trump's false and misleading statements stem from his tweets, according to the Post.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Fact-checker counts 16K false, misleading claims by Trump in three years

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
President Trump has made 16,241 false or misleading claims during his three years in office, according to The Washington Post's Fact Checker. In 2019, Trump reportedly more than doubled the number of false or misleading claims he made compared to his first two years in office combined.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Three years after taking the oath of office, President Trump has made more than 16,200 false or misleading claims - a milestone that would have been unthinkable when we first created the Fact Checker's database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement he has uttered.

We started this project as part of our coverage of the president's first 100 days, largely because we could not possibly keep up with the pace and volume of the president's misstatements. We recorded 492 claims - an average of just under five a day - and readers demanded that we keep it going for the rest of Trump's presidency.

Little did we know what that would mean.

In 2017, Trump made 1,999 false or misleading claims. In 2018, he added 5,689 more, for a total of 7,688. And in 2019, he made 8,155 suspect claims.

In other words, in a single year, the president said more than the total number of false or misleading claims he had made in the previous two years. Put another way: He averaged six such claims a day in 2017, nearly 16 a day in 2018 and more than 22 a day in 2019.

As of Jan. 19, his 1,095th day in office, Trump had made 16,241 false or misleading claims. Only 366 days to go - at least in this term.

The president added to his total on Sunday evening with more than 20 Trumpian claims - many old favorites - during a triumphant speech at the annual conference of the American Farm Bureau Federation. He incorrectly described trade agreements - suggesting Canadian dairy tariffs were eliminated and an agreement with Japan to reduce tariffs on $7 billion of farm products was "a $40 billion deal" - and also falsely asserted that "tough" farmers and ranchers were crying as he signed a repeal of Obama-era regulations. A video of the event shows no one crying.

In 2018 and 2019, October and November ranked as the months in which Trump made the most false or misleading claims: October 2018: 1,205; October 2019: 1,159; November 2019: 903; and November 2018: 867.

In 2018, Trump barnstormed the country in an effort to thwart a Democratic takeover of the House. The two biggest false-claim days were before the election: Nov. 5: 139, and Nov. 3: 128.

The key reasons for last year's surge in October and November was the uproar over a phone call on July 25 in which Trump urged Ukraine's president to announce an investigation of former vice president Joe Biden, a potential 2020 election rival - and the ensuing House impeachment inquiry. Almost 1,000 of the false and misleading claims made by the president deal with the Ukraine investigation, even though it only became a category four months ago.

The president apparently believes he can weather an impeachment trial through sheer repetition of easily disproved falsehoods.

For instance, nearly 70 times he has claimed that a whistleblower complaint about the call was inaccurate. The report accurately captured the content of Trump's call and many other details have been confirmed. Nearly 100 times, Trump has claimed his phone call with the Ukrainian president was "perfect," even though it so alarmed other White House officials that several immediately raised private objections.

Three claims about the Ukraine investigation have now made it onto our list of Bottomless Pinocchios. (It takes 20 repeats of a Three- or Four-Pinocchio claim to merit a Bottomless Pinocchio, and there are now 32 entries.) Besides the claim about the whistleblower, the two other claims on the Bottomless Pinocchio list are that Biden forced the resignation of a Ukrainian prosecutor because he was investigating his son Hunter Biden and that Hunter Biden scored $1.5 billion in China after hitching a ride on Air Force Two with his father.

Trump crossed the 10,000 mark on April 26. From the start of his presidency, he has averaged nearly 15 such claims a day.

About one in five of these claims are about the economy or jobs.

As Trump approaches a tough reelection campaign, his most repeated claim - 257 times - is that the U.S. economy today is the best in history. He began making this claim in June 2018, and it quickly became one of his favorites. The president can certainly brag about the state of the economy, but he runs into trouble when he repeatedly makes a play for the history books. By just about any important measure, the economy today is not doing as well as it did under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson or Bill Clinton - or Ulysses S. Grant. Moreover, the economy is beginning to hit the head winds caused by Trump's trade wars, with the manufacturing sector in an apparent recession.

About one in six of Trump's claims are about immigration, his signature issue - a percentage that increased in early 2019 when the government was partly shut down over funding for his promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. In fact, his second-most-repeated claim - 242 times - is that his border wall is being built. Congress balked at funding the concrete barrier he envisioned, so he has tried to pitch bollard fencing and mostly repairs of existing barriers as "a wall." (Almost all of the 100 miles that have been completed replaced previous barriers.) The Washington Post has reported that the bollard fencing is easily breached, with smugglers sawing through it, despite Trump's claims that it is impossible to get past.

Trump has falsely said 184 times that he passed the biggest tax cut in history. Even before his tax cut was crafted, he promised that it would be the biggest in U.S. history - bigger than Ronald Reagan's in 1981. Reagan's tax cut amounted to 2.9 percent of the gross domestic product, and none of the proposals under consideration came close to that level. Yet Trump persisted in this fiction even when the tax cut was eventually crafted to be the equivalent of 0.9 percent of gross domestic product, making it the eighth-largest tax cut in 100 years. This continues to be an all-purpose applause line at the president's rallies.

On 176 occasions, Trump has claimed the United States has "lost" money on trade deficits. This reflects a basic misunderstanding of economics. Countries do not "lose" money on trade deficits. A trade deficit simply means people in one country are buying more goods from another country than people in the second country are buying from the first country. Trade deficits are also affected by macroeconomic factors, such as currencies, economic growth, and savings and investment rates.

The president's constant Twitter barrage also adds to his totals. Nearly 20 percent of the false and misleading statements stemmed from his itchy Twitter finger.

Trump's penchant for repeating false claims is demonstrated by the fact that the Fact Checker database has recorded more than 400 instances in which he has repeated a variation of the same claim at least three times.

The award-winning database website, created by graphics reporter Leslie Shapiro, has an extremely fast search engine that will quickly locate suspect statements the president has made. We encourage readers to explore it in detail. We recently added a new feature that provides a URL for every claim that is fact-checked, allowing readers to post the link on social media.

Note: The Fact Checker welcomes academic research of the Trump claims database. Recent examples include work done by Erasmus University, University College London and the University of California at Santa Barbara. You can request our data files with an explanation of your research plans by contacting us at factchecker@washpost.com.

The Fact Checker is a verified signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network code of principles

AD

AD

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Analysis | President Trump made 16,241 false or misleading claims in his first three years

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Three years after taking the oath of office, President Trump has made more than 16,200 false or misleading claims - a milestone that would have been unthinkable when we first created the Fact Checker's database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement he has uttered.