Our updated tally of President Trump's false/misleading claims: 1950 claims in 347 daysAs regular readers know, the president has a tendency to repeat himself — often. According to...
| |  | | Democracy Dies in Darkness | | | | | | | | | | The truth behind the rhetoric | | | | | | Our updated tally of President Trump's false/misleading claims: 1950 claims in 347 days As regular readers know, the president has a tendency to repeat himself — often. According to our database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president, there are now more than 60 claims that he has repeated three or more times. We started this project because the pace and volume of the president's misstatements means that we cannot possibly keep up. Readers can use the interactive database to quickly search a claim after they hear it, since there's a good chance he's said it before. We currently have a tie for Trump's most repeated claims, both made 61 times. Namely, the president's claim that "Obamacare is failing" (the Congressional Budget Office found Obamacare exchanges are expected to remain stable for the foreseeable future) and his habit of taking credit for business decisions he didn't make. Alongside the successful push in Congress to pass a tax plan, two claims about taxes rose rapidly: that the tax plan will be the biggest tax cut in U.S. history and that the United States is one of the highest-taxed nations (both false). As clocks turned to 2018, the president's tally stood at 1,950 flip-flops and false or misleading claims. With an average of 5.6 per day, he is on track to exceed 2,000 false or misleading claims by the end of his first year in office. |  | | Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this e-mail was forwarded to you, sign up here for the weekly newsletter. Hear something fact-checkable? Send it here, we'll check it out. | | | Do Russia probe attorneys' donations to Democrats threaten their independence? In June, President Trump claimed, "The people that have been hired [for special counsel Robert S. Mueller's team] are all Hillary Clinton supporters. Some of them worked for Hillary Clinton." The Fact Checker examined the claim at the time and found that four of the eight known team members had made political contributions and four had no record of making such contributions. A reader asked us to provide an update, given that 15 team members have now been identified and one previously identified person has left. We found nine known members of the current Mueller's team have made political donations to Democrats, compared to six with no record of such donations. Five of those people contributed to Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, leaving the team more unbalanced than the 4-4 split we found last June. Regardless, the DOJ is legally barred from discriminating career appointees based on political affiliation. One member of the team, Jeannie Rhee, who donated the maximum amount to Clinton's campaign, represented the Clinton Foundation in a 2015 lawsuit. Another, Aaron Zebley, who made no political donations, represented a Clinton aide at one point. That's not the same as working for Clinton. The president is stretching the truth. He (still) earns Three Pinocchios. |  | | | We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can also reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @mmkelly22 or use #FactCheckThis), or Facebook (Fact Checker). Read about our rating scale here, and sign up here for our weekly Fact Checker newsletter. | | Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. --Meg Kelly | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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