It took Donald Trump 343 days to utter 1,000 false claims as president.
.jpg)
Then his dishonesty accelerated. It took him just 197 days to get to 2,000 false claims.
Then it got worse again: it took 93 days to get to 3,000. And then it got worse once more: it took him 75 days to hit 4,000. There's been a slight improvement since Christmas, found Star editor Ed Tubb, the number-cruncher for these fact-checks. It took him 125 days to get to 5,000 false claims — a mere, for him, 8 per day over that period.
But 8 per day is a lot. It's all a lot. Through Sunday, Trump has made an astonishing 5,276 false claims in office, an overall average of 6.1 per day.
This week's update is actually an update for six weeks. (I took some time off work and fell hopelessly behind). Three of those weeks were among the worst 25 of Trump's 125 so far.
He made 86 false claims the week ending April 28 (14th-worst), 72 false claims the week ending May 19 (22nd-worst), and 69 false claims the week ending May 26 (23rd-worst).
I've also added some repeated false claims I missed in weeks prior — Trump's claim that Puerto Rico has received $91 billion in hurricane assistance, which is not close to true, and Trump's claim that China has lost $15 trillion, $20 trillion, $24 trillion or $25 trillion during his presidency. (He has used different numbers for no apparent reason.)
On a personal note: this will be my last weekly update for the Star. I'll be continuing the fact-checking at CNN beginning on June 17. Thank you for reading all this time.
If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of “false claims,” not lies? You can read our detailed explanation here. The short answer is that we can't be sure that each and every one was intentional. In some cases, he may have been confused or ignorant. What we know, objectively, is that he was not telling the truth.