President Donald Trump lies… a lot. He’s been documented to have lied thousands and thousands of times since taking office, and the fact-checkers at The Washington Post have now introduced a new rating for the lies Trump repeats the most — the “bottomless Pinocchio,” taking after their already in place ratings of one through four Pinocchios.
To be in the bottomless rating, a claim must have previously been rated as an egregious lie — with three to four Pinocchios — and repeated by the public figure in question at least 20 times. Although that’s a high standard — more than a dozen claims from President Trump already make the cut.
As Glenn Kessler described the situation:
‘The president keeps going long after the facts are clear, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to replace the truth with his own, far more favorable, version of it. He is not merely making gaffes or misstating things, he is purposely injecting false information into the national conversation.’
The 14 claims the president’s documented to have utilized for his disinformation campaigns cover a wide variety of subjects.
In the seven months before the recently concluded midterm elections, he lied 86 times that the border wall he’d long sought between the country and Mexico was under construction.
Although there’s been some work on the fencing already in place in many areas, the wall hasn’t been started. The administration hasn’t even procured money from Congress for it, although that won’t stop the president from asking for a whopping $15 billion or else anyway. The always ludicrous claim that Mexico would pay for the wall went right out the window.
Trump says that the high cost will be justified by the lower cost to the United States from the illegal drug trade — but drug smugglers aren’t using methods like throwing bags of drugs over the border demarcation that is already there, despite Trump’s 40 and counting hyperbolic claims otherwise. The Drug Enforcement Administration asserts that most of the illegal drug trade functions on product carried through legal ports of entry — or just ordered online or otherwise obtained from medical professionals, in the case of the opioid crisis.
In sticking to fantasy, Trump fails those who would use his administration’s help — and he keeps lying about other issues, too.
He’s wrongfully claimed 36 times and counting that the United States has spent $7 trillion in the Middle East, and he’s also lied 87 times that the United States shoulders the burden of most of the costs associated with NATO.
Elsewhere, he’s claimed that an arms deal he struck with Saudi Arabia was worth as much as $450 billion and would create an absurd one million jobs across the United States. Needless to say, the real numbers are much lower. Incorporating all of the agreement’s components, no matter how tangible, leaves a value of $267 billion and most of the associated job creation in Saudi Arabia.
But Trump won’t stop lying anyway. He lied a whopping 123 times before the midterm elections that the tax reform package he signed into law in late 2017 delivered the largest tax cut in history.
Besides inflating his own ego, he’s also repeated multiple lies over 20 times about the Russia investigation. However, the Democrats did not collude with Russia, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller isn’t leading a team of “angry Democrats.”
Trump can’t hide behind his lies forever.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
