| |  | | Democracy Dies in Darkness | | | | | | | | | | The truth behind the rhetoric | | | | | | 10,000! 🎉🎊🎈 The president of the United States has exceeded 10,000 false or misleading claims since his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. Let that sink in for a moment. To be precise, that's 10,111 claims in 828 days, according to The Fact Checker's database tracking and analyzing all of Trump's suspect statements. What started as a snowball is now a full-on avalanche. The president averaged fewer than five claims a day in his first 100 days. But his pace has quickened like a rocket. We're now at 12 claims a day, counting from Inauguration Day through April 27. Looking only at the last seven months, it's nearly 23 a day. False and misleading claims are a staple of the president's speeches, interviews and tweets; Cabinet meetings, bilateral summits and news conferences; bill signings, video messages and campaign rallies. Some of Trump's most recurrent talking points ("biggest tax cut," "the economy was going down when I took office," "Democratic laws forced family separations") are demonstrably false. Yet the president repeats them like a broken record to anyone listening. This pattern of constant repetition is the key to Trump's 10,000 milestone. We've recorded nearly 300 instances in which the president has repeated a variation of the same claim at least three times. Trump also has racked up 21 "Bottomless Pinocchios," claims that have earned Three or Four Pinocchios and that have been repeated at least 20 times. Some fast facts: * Out of all 828 days, Trump made the most fishy claims on Nov. 5, 2018, the day before the midterm elections. He held three campaign rallies and made 139 false or misleading claims. * October 2018 is the top month, with 1,204 claims. * About one-fifth of the president's claims are about immigration, a percentage that has grown since the government shutdown over funding for his promised border wall. In fact, his most repeated claim — 160 times — is that his border wall is being built. All 10,111 claims are categorized and fact-checked in our searchable database, and we will keep adding more as they come. |  | | 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. Biden's bad take on Trump's tax cut "There's a $2 trillion tax cut last year. Did you feel it? Did you get anything from it? Of course not. Of course not. All of it went to folks at the top and corporations." That was former vice president Joe Biden, at a rally in Pittsburgh kicking off his presidential campaign. His sweeping claim about the tax cut, that "all of it went to folks at the top and corporations that pay no taxes," is clearly not accurate. Biden is not the first Democrat to wade into these Pinocchio-laden waters. As we have explained before, any broad-based tax cut is going to mostly benefit the wealthy because they already pay a large share of income taxes. According to Treasury Department data, the top 20 percent of income earners paid 95.2 percent of individual income taxes in 2017. The top 10 percent paid 81 percent. The top 0.1 percent paid an astonishing 24.1 percent of taxes. Tax-policy experts have debated just how much the benefit is for middle-class earners, but they agree that the middle class makes out with more money in the pocket. The left-leaning Institution of Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) acknowledges that most people would get a tax cut but says the tax changes as a share of pretax income are larger for the wealthy. The average pretax share is estimated to be 2.1 percent for all taxpayers in 2018, but the richest 1 percent would get 2.6 percent and the middle quintile would receive 1.6 percent, ITEP said. Other politicians are more careful to nuance their statements about the impact of the tax cut. Biden, however, made a blanket claim that no Americans but those at the top received any tax cut in 2018, which is false. Most Americans received a tax cut, and Biden received Four Pinocchios. | |  | | Itchy, glitchy Twitter fingers Media Matters, the liberal media watchdog organization, put our Trump database of false or misleading claims to work in an interesting way. They used it as a matrix to compare how major media organizations displayed false or misleading Trump claims in headlines and social media. Did they rebut the claim? Did they parrot it uncritically? It makes a difference, because many readers only read headlines or social media posts, not full articles. Among the key findings: "30% of the tweets by major media outlets' Twitter accounts about Trump remarks referenced a false or misleading statement" and "nearly two-thirds of the time, the outlets did not dispute that misinformation." One bright spot: "The Washington Post's feed disputed Trump's misinformation at the highest rate of any feed we studied that tweeted about 10 or more false Trump claims. Out of 37 tweets about false or misleading Trump claims, the outlet disputed the misinformation 33 times and failed four times, a success rate of 89%." We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. | | | Recommended for you | | |  | | | Get The Trailer newsletter | | News and insight on political campaigns around the country, from David Weigel. 435 districts. 50 states. 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