At Trump's campaign rally, 3 in 4 claims fail the truth testWe did the math on President Trump's recent campaign rally in Montana. It's not pretty.After analyzing each and every...
| |  | | Democracy Dies in Darkness | | | | | | | | | | The truth behind the rhetoric | | | | | | At Trump's campaign rally, 3 in 4 claims fail the truth test We did the math on President Trump's recent campaign rally in Montana. It's not pretty. After analyzing each and every statement of fact made by the president, we counted 98 total and found that 76 percent were false, misleading or unsupported by evidence. Let that sink in. For every accurate or mostly accurate statement, Trump said three things that were false, misleading or unsubstantiated. Here's a breakdown: 45 statements were false or mostly false, 25 were misleading, 24 were accurate or mostly accurate, and four were unsupported. The Fact Checker's database has been tracking all of Trump's false or misleading statements since he took office. But we had never measured the proportion of false statements to accurate statements. The president's July 5 rally in Montana seemed like a good chance to see which side would win. As we said, the results weren't pretty. We fact-checked and categorized all 98 statements, which include a lot of Trump's greatest hits on immigration, trade and the Russia investigation. He also threw some new falsehoods into the mix, crowing that he gets bigger crowds than Elton John and claiming he was the first Republican to win Wisconsin since 1952. |  | | 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. | | | The thinly sourced theories about Trump's loans and Justice Kennedy's son Speculation abounded after Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the Supreme Court. Some theorized that his son Justin's work with Donald Trump at Deutsche Bank more than a decade before had somehow compromised the elder Kennedy's independence on the Court or led him to retire. Neera Tanden and Richard Painter, two prominent Trump critics with large Twitter followings, implied that something nefarious was afoot. Justin Kennedy worked at Deutsche Bank from 1998 to 2009, and our reporting showed he worked on one Trump-related project dating to 2005: a $640 million loan from Deutsche Bank and others to build a Chicago skyscraper. Think about that. Why would a mostly conservative justice need any inducement to retire, at 81, with a conservative president in the White House? Why would he need to be coerced into voting for Trump's positions, when his record is mostly conservative? How could his son have known in 2005 that Trump would be president someday far off in the future? These theories are incendiary — and there's no evidence to back them up. We gave Painter and Tanden's tweets Four Pinocchios. |  | | The president's credibility gap One-third of Americans think Trump tells the truth all or most of the time. The other two-thirds are more jaded about the president's utterances. That's according to a new poll by The Washington Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government, which included an interesting question about Trump's credibility gap. The survey of 1,473 U.S. adults asked, "In general, how much of the time do you think Trump tells the truth?" | | | Hardly ever: 36 percent.
Only some of the time: 31 percent.
Most of the time: 28 percent.
All of the time: 4 percent. | | Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. — Salvador Rizzo | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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