The Trump campaign is creating an alternate reality online about coronavirus There is little question the Trump administration bungled several key moments in the coronavirus response. Time was wasted. Delays led to a false sense of security. Shortages left medical personnel without needed protective equipment. But a quick glance through the social media feeds of the president, his campaign or his surrogates tells a different story. The president and the White House often say they use social media because "fake news" coverage does not depict Trump's achievements accurately. The Fact Checker video team analyzed thousands of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube posts and ads from Trump, his campaign and a long list of surrogates. The data revealed the backbone of a five-point strategy to tell their version of the coronavirus story: rewriting mistakes (such as, "everyone can get tested"), highlighting achievements ("the China ban saved lives"), deflecting blame ("the Obama administration left a bare cupboard"), declaring victory ("it's time to reopen the economy") and creating distraction ("Look! Michael Flynn!"). This nonstop, if often inaccurate, narrative of a successful response was then amplified by the campaign's savvy digital infrastructure. All presidential campaigns try to portray their candidate in the best possible light, but the Trump campaign's social media reach is helping to rewrite even the most recent history. For the full fact check, click here, and watch the video here. Sign up for The Post's Coronavirus Updates newsletter to track the outbreak. All stories linked within the newsletter are free to access. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. 'A great public service'We wrote the book on fact-checking Trump, and it goes on sale Tuesday. "Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth" over 386 pages debunks all of the president's biggest deceptions from his first three years in office, a period during which he made more than 16,000 false or misleading claims on everything from the economy, immigration, his campaign's contacts with Russia, dealings with Ukraine that led to his impeachment, and more. We also included a chapter on Trump's faulty claims about the covid-19 pandemic. The New Yorker writer Susan B. Glasser calls it "a great public service of a book." She writes, "The book is not just a compendium of the President's tens of thousands of falsehoods, misleading claims, and lies during the first three years of his Presidency; it's also an effort to catalogue and explain the different pathologies at work in his systematic misrepresentations to the American people." She adds of some of Trump's choicest falsehoods: "These are not standard-issue political lies being foisted on the public but nuclear-weapons-grade falsehoods that speak directly to the President's character. They are of a scale and volume that simply defy precedent, even in a country that had Richard Nixon as its leader." Kirkus in a "starred" review calls the book an "extremely valuable chronicle" and especially praises "the fact checkers' point-by-point analyses, lie by lie, of the relative falsehoods uttered, measured by 'Pinocchios.'" We'll be presenting the book and taking questions on Wednesday evening, June 3, in a video chat hosted online by the Washington bookstore Politics and Prose. You can order a copy at online booksellers. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @rizzoTK, @mmkelly22, @SarahCahlan) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | 
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