A thousand days of Trump We often hear from readers wondering how President Trump's penchant for falsehoods stacks up in comparison to previous presidents. But there is no comparison: Trump exists in a league of his own. Deception, misdirection, gaslighting, revisionism, absurd boasts, and in some cases, provable lies, are core to his politics. As of Wednesday, Oct. 16, Trump had been president for 1,000 days. He made more than 13,400 false or misleading claims, according to The Fact Checker's database tracking all of the president's prevarications. To be exact, our last database update covered 993 days of Trump and the counter hit 13,435. That's an average of 14 false or misleading claims per day. One big reason for the uptick: The uproar over Trump's phone call with Ukraine's president on July 25 — in which he urged an investigation of former vice president Joe Biden, a potential 2020 election rival — and the ensuing House impeachment inquiry. We've added a new category of claims, "Ukraine probe," and in just a few weeks it has topped 250 entries. In fact, Trump earned his fastest Bottomless Pinocchio ever with his repeated false statement that the whistleblower compliant about the call was inaccurate. The report accurately captured the content of Trump's call and many other details have been confirmed, yet Trump has repeated this Four Pinocchio claim 29 times. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this e-mail was forwarded to you, sign up here. Hear something fact-checkable? Send it here, we'll check it out. Democrats rumble in Ohio The fourth Democratic presidential debate of the 2020 campaign had 12 candidates, lasted three hours — and did not have many statements that merited fact-checking. But we did spy some of the candidates playing fast-and-loose with numbers or facts. Former housing secretary Julian Castro said "Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania actually in the latest jobs data have lost jobs, not gained them." This is not correct, according to the latest monthly data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate went up modestly in Ohio, from 4 percent to 4.1 percent from July to August, but remained steady in Pennsylvania at 3.9 percent and declined from 4.3 percent to 4.2 percent in Michigan. The number of jobs — the size of labor forces — increased in all three states. "You have half a million people sleeping out on the street today," Sen. Bernie Sanders said. His number came from a single-night survey done by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to measure the number of homeless people. For a single night in January 2018, the estimate was that 553,000 people are homeless. But the report also says that two-thirds — nearly 360,000 — were in emergency shelters or transitional housing programs; the other 195,000 were "unsheltered" — i.e., on the street, as Sanders put it. The number has been trending down over the past decade; it was 650,000 in 2007. "If you eliminated the entire Pentagon, every single thing — planes, ship, troop, the buildings, everything, satellites — it would pay for a total of four months [of Medicare-for-all]," according to former vice president Joe Biden. His campaign said he was comparing the cost of Sanders's Medicare-for-all proposal with the Defense Department's budget request for 2020. But the Sanders plan is estimated to cost $30 trillion over 10 years. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has a 10-year estimate for total defense spending: $7 trillion from 2019 to 2028. That's about one-fifth of the cost of Medicare-for-all over 10 years. It suggests that — all else being equal — defunding the military would cover two years, not four months, of the cost of Medicare-for-all. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can also reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @mmkelly22, @rizzoTK @SarahCahlan or use #FactCheckThis), or Facebook (Fact Checker). Read about our rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | | | By Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly ● Read more » | | | | | | | | | Analysis ● By Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly ● Read more » | | | | 
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