IT'S TRUE: TRUMP IS LYING MORE, AND DOING IT ON PURPOSE

The New Yorker

On Thursday, the Washington Post published a remarkable story on its front page revealing a recent spike in the number of “false and misleading claims” made by President Trump. 

In his first year as President, Trump made 2,140 false claims, according to the Post. 

In just the last six months, he has nearly doubled that total to 4,229. 

In June and July, he averaged 16 false claims a day.

On July 5th, the Post found what appears to be Trump’s most untruthful day yet: 76 per cent of the 98 factual assertions he made in a campaign-style rally in Great Falls, Montana, were “false, misleading or unsupported by evidence.” 

Trump’s rallies have become the signature events of his Presidency, and it is there that the President most often plays fast and loose with the facts, in service to his political priorities and to telling his fervent supporters what they want and expect to hear from him. 

At another rally this week, in Tampa, Trump made 35 false and misleading claims, on subjects ranging from trade with China to the size of his tax cut.

These astonishing statistics were compiled by a small team overseen by Glenn Kessler, the editor and chief writer of the Post’s Fact Checker column, who for much of the last decade has been truth-squadding politicians and doling out Pinocchios for their exaggerations, misrepresentations, distortions, and otherwise false claims. 

At this point, Kessler practically has a Ph.D. in the anthropology of the Washington lie, a long and storied art form which has always had skilled practitioners of both parties. But Trump has challenged the Fact Checker, Kessler told me over coffee this week, in ways that have tested the very premise of the column. 

The President, for example, has a habit of repeating the same falsehoods over and over again, especially as they concern his core political causes, such as trade or immigration or getting European allies to contribute more to NATO. 

What should Kessler do, he often asks himself, when Trump repeats a four-Pinocchio whopper? Since taking office, the Postfact-checking team found, Trump has repeated close to a 150 untruths at least three times. Kessler has instated a Trump-specific database in response. 

Initially, the Post planned to compile the database of Trump’s misrepresentations as part of a project for his 100 days in office. But the numbers kept piling up; now, Kessler told me, he is committed to keeping it up for Trump’s full term, documenting every “untruth” (per Post policy, he does not use the label “lies” even for the most egregious Presidential whoppers). 

“We’re kind of doing it for history,” he said.

History books will likely declare the last few months a turning point in the Trump Presidency, and Kessler’s laborious work gives us metrics that confirm what is becoming more and more apparent: the recent wave of misstatements is both a reflection of Trump’s increasingly unbound Presidency and a signal attribute of it. 

The upsurge provides empirical evidence that Trump, in recent months, has felt more confident running his White House as he pleases, keeping his own counsel, and saying and doing what he wants when he wants to. The fact that Trump, while historically unpopular with the American public as a whole, has retained the loyalty of more than 80 per cent of Republicans – the group at which his lies seem to be aimed – means we are in for much more, as a midterm election approaches that may determine whether Trump is impeached by a newly Democratic Congress. 

At this point, the falsehoods are as much a part of his political identity as his floppy orange hair and the “Make America Great Again” slogan. The untruths, Kessler told me, are Trump’s political “secret sauce.”

That appears to be the case for others on Trump’s team as well. 

As Kessler and I talked, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, presided at one of her increasingly rare press briefings. (Another metric to consider: Sanders gave three briefings in all of July, while previous Administrations conducted them daily.) 

In the briefing, Sanders repeated a number of false claims, including one that Kessler had previously debunked, that reporters put out “leaked” information that caused Osama bin Laden to stop using his satellite phone and slowed the hunt for the Al Qaeda leader before the 9/11 attacks. 

Kessler heard about Sanders’s false claim as we were leaving and retweeted his old article. “Kind of amazed but not surprised,” he wrote on Twitter, that the White House press secretary “would cite uninformed reporting that appeared BEFORE I debunked this fable in 2005.”

A day later, she made her personal view of the press clear. Asked repeatedly Thursday whether she endorses Trump’s oft-stated line that the media are the “enemies of the people,” Sanders refused to reject Trump’s characterization. 

“I’m here to speak on behalf of the President,” she said. “He’s made his comments clear.” The White House assault on the truth is not an accident – it is intentional.