Trump’s Greatest Hits (Against the Truth)
Donald Trump is a notorious liar, but I continue to be surprised by people who claim that his reputation is just the product of a hostile mainstream media. There are many fine fact-checking institutions, including www.factcheck.org, Snopes, and The Washington Post, which detail his daily offenses against accuracy and honesty. The Post was so overwhelmed by the shear quantity of the falsehoods that it created a dataset cataloging the 20,000 times (by their count) that Trump got something wrong.
Many of Trump’s false or misleading statements are similar to those of other politicians, though he makes many more than others. What is unique about Trump is his willingness to tell truly egregious falsehoods: statements that are clearly untrue or have no basis for believing them, and which would be shocking or amazing if they were true. These are far outside the realm of spin and occasional duplicity that politicians usually engage in.
Despite all the great sources mentioned above, I haven’t found a comprehensive summary of the egregious falsehoods that Trump has spouted since running for office. The Washington Post’s database is searchable but a little overwhelming: even the “Four Pinocchios” category of blatant lies has a mind-numbing length. When going through the dataset, the shear volume of ordinary spin and dishonesty dilutes the most brazen perversions of truth.
I have compiled my list from the factcheck.org “Whoppers of the Year” (dominated by Trump since 2015) as well as a few other examples I was familiar with. One can argue about which of Trump’s “20,000 false or misleading statements” deserve the most attention, but I think the 20+ give a good idea of why we can say that Trump displays a contempt for truth that is unique among major American politicians. It is long enough to show the range and magnitude of his dishonesty but short enough to be digestible.
For most politicians, being caught telling even one of these 23 falsehoods would be career-ending. For Trump, they have been career-building.
Eventually I would like to convert the list to a more web-friendly format. Here I include a graphic showing all the falsehoods, and include a multi-page PDF file in which each group of falsehoods is linked to details and sources.
Of course, if anyone finds anything here that is incorrect, I would like to know so I can fix the mistake.