Which Trump lies stick? There's no newsletter next week. We're taking a break, so the newsletter will return April 26. Fictions, misleading claims, wild exaggerations, lies — former president Donald Trump dispenses untruths of one variant or another relentlessly. The falsehoods range from the inconsequential, like the crowd size at his inauguration, to the democracy-shaking, like the "stolen" 2020 election. With Trump barreling toward November, when Americans will have a chance to choose him to lead the nation again, The Washington Post Fact Checker sought to get a sense of the staying power of his lies — whether people are more or less likely to believe them over time and which lies prove the stickiest — as well as measure the value Americans place in a president's honesty, however they define it. Midway through Trump's presidency, in 2018, we documented through a poll that most Americans, including Republicans, did not believe many of his most repeated claims. A fresh Washington Post-Schar School poll shows that remains largely the case, with an average of 28 percent of Americans believing Trump's false claims tested in the poll. But Trump has made significant inroads in convincing Republicans that his lies are the truth. That applies to election integrity especially — the basis of Trump's "big lie." Even more significant, Americans appear to have diverged on the meaning of honesty itself. Among Republicans, fewer now say that Trump regularly makes misleading statements. Slightly more view him as more honest than they did in 2018, despite an extraordinarily large amount of evidence that Trump often does not tell the truth. Highlights of the poll Six years ago, just about 1 in 4 Republicans (26 percent) agreed that millions of fraudulent votes were cast in the 2016 election. Now, 38 percent of Republicans — and 47 percent of strong Trump supporters — believe that is the case. Among all Americans, belief in this false claim hardly changed because Democrats moved sharply in the opposite direction from Republicans. Trump often made this claim to justify his loss of the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016, when the electoral college propelled him to the Oval Office. In 2018, a little more than a quarter of Republicans, 27 percent, said they believed Trump's claim that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election, benefiting Trump, despite substantial evidence assembled by intelligence agencies that it did interfere. Today, more Republicans, 37 percent, say they believe the false claim, despite the addition of a bipartisan Senate report concluding that Russia interfered, and criminal indictments of a dozen Russians. Overall, just about 1 in 5 Americans believe this. Trump has convinced 70 percent of Republicans — and 81 percent of his strong supporters — that Biden won the 2020 election because of voter fraud, though not a single allegation has been proven. Slightly more than one-third of Americans overall believe this. He has even convinced 51 percent of Republicans — and 58 percent of his most fervent supporters — that some cities tallied more votes than registered voters. This ludicrous claim is disproven simply by checking the statistics. Yet Trump has repeated it in rally after rally, often identifying Democratic strongholds like Detroit and Philadelphia. Click the link to learn more about our findings. 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. 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 subjects. So we hope to bring a smile to your face. Scroll down to read other Trump-related fact checks | 
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