News Reporter: Fact Checker: Trump’s recent Four Pinocchio flights of fancy

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The truth behind the rhetoric.

By Glenn Kessler

Former president Donald Trump tells so many tall tales that it's hard to keep track. Sometimes, one of his invented stories blows up into an actual news story, such as when he related a dramatic but fake tale of a helicopter ride he said he shared with Willie Brown, a former mayor of San Francisco, that involved a near-death experience and Brown, who once dated Kamala Harris, saying "terrible things" about her. Brown has said the ride never took place. Trump's nonsensical story involving a sinking electric boat, a potential electrocution and a ferocious shark attack also earned news coverage — and mockery. (We won't even begin to fact check whether his claim that Arnold Palmer was "all man" is true.)

But most of the time, Trump rambles on, in rally after rally, interview after interview, virtually unchecked in the friendly media environs he favors. We fact check when we can, but the overwhelming nature of his onslaught of falsehoods — and the trivial nature of many of them — makes it difficult to keep up. He has a standard repertory that he used often during his presidency, which he has augmented with updated or new false claims.

We examined some of his latest made-up stories, including:

Hydrogen cars blow up and 'you're not even recognizable'
Deere reversed plans to move to Mexico because of Trump
Schools send students to sex-change operations
He won environmental awards at Doral and elsewhere
Harris will get rid of cows

To read the full fact check, please click the link below.

Read the full fact check

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Fact-checking Trump's swing-state claims

Michigan and Pennsylvania are two crucial swing states, and this week we examined claims made by a Trump campaign ad and by Trump on the stump. (Readers may ask: Why not more Harris fact checks? The reality is she doesn't say as many false things — and when she repeats herself, we've most likely already fact-checked the claim.)

In Michigan, Trump is running an ad that falsely claims: "She wants to end all gas-powered cars. Crazy but true. Harris's push requiring electric only is failing big, and Michigan autoworkers are paying the price. Massive layoffs already started."

Massive layoffs? American motor vehicle manufacturing employment hit a 34-year high in July. Auto and auto parts employment is at a 16-year high. The number of people with auto manufacturing jobs in Michigan, a crucial swing state, is the most since before the Great Recession in 2007.

In Pennsylvania, Trump regularly claims Harris wants to ban fracking and that that would cost the state 500,000 jobs. But she doesn't want to ban fracking — she cast the tiebreaking vote in 2022 to expand fracking — and Trump's job number is highly exaggerated. We dug into the math, which is hard to parse because fracking is not a job category, but the best estimate is one-tenth the size of Trump's figure.

To read the full fact check on Michigan and learn the Pinocchio rating, please click the link below.

Read the full fact check

To read the full fact check on Pennsylvania and learn the Pinocchio rating, please click the link below.

Read the full fact check

We're always looking for fact-check suggestions.

You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP and @AdriUsero) or Facebook. We're also on TikTok. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here.

About the cats: It's a Friday and sometimes our fact checks deal with heavy or depressing subjects. So we hope to bring a smile to your face.

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