WASHINGTON — One year after taking the oath of office, President Trump has made 2,140 false or misleading claims, according a Washington Post database that analyzes, categorizes, and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president. That’s an average of nearly 5.9 claims a day.
The Post started the Fact Checker database as part of its coverage of the president’s first 100 days. Readers and scholars asked the paper to expand the project, and it now plans to keep it operating for the rest of Trump’s presidency.
The database includes a running list of every false or misleading statement made by Trump. It also catalogues many flip-flops that Trump has declined to acknowledge.
While the president is known to make outrageous claims on Twitter — and that was a major source of his falsehoods — he made most of his false statements in unscripted remarks before reporters.
Prepared speeches and interviews were other key sources of false claims. That’s because the president relies on talking points or assertions that he had made in the past — and has continued to make, even though they had been fact-checked as wrong.
This makes Trump a rarity among politicians. Many will drop a false claim after it has been deemed false. But Trump just repeats the same claim over and over, perhaps believing that repetition will make it ring truer.
By the Post’s count, there were only 56 days — or about 15 percent of the time — on which no claims were recorded. These were often days when the president golfed.
But there were also 12 days in which Trump made more than 30 claims. These were often days when he held campaign-style rallies, riffing without much of a script.
On July 25, when he held a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, The Post recorded 52 claims. On Nov. 29, when he spoke in St. Louis, it counted 49 claims. On Dec. 8, he touted Senate hopeful Roy Moore at a rally in Pensacola, Fla., and that yielded another 44 claims.
There’s a pattern about Trump’s exaggerations. Often he inflates the impact of his own actions, or he denigrates people or programs he dislikes.
This dynamic is represented in the near-tie for Trump’s most repeated claims. Both of these claims date from the start of Trump’s presidency and to a large extent have faded as talking points.
From his earliest days as president, Trump repeatedly took credit for events or business decisions that happened before he took the oath of office, or had even been elected. Sixty-two times, he has touted that he secured business investments and job announcements that had been previously announced and could easily be found with a Google search.
Among other deals, Trump took credit for a $1 billion investment by Fiat Chrysler (which the company said was due to talks with unions in 2015), a $1 billion General Motors investment (also in the works for some time), 10,000 jobs added by Walmart (announced in 2016), and 10,000 jobs created by Intel (announced originally in 2011).
He also took credit for 1 million planned jobs by Chinese e-company Alibaba (a plan outlined in 2015) and a $25 billion investment by Charter Communications (in the works since 2015). Trump also touted a big investment by Japanese company SoftBank — which announced its investment fund three weeks before the US elections, when Trump faced a narrow path to victory.
Trump has also repeatedly asserted (61 times) that the Affordable Care Act was failing or on the edge of disaster or in serious trouble. But the Congressional Budget Office has said that the federal exchanges, despite well-documented issues, are not imploding and are expected to remain stable for the foreseeable future. Strong enrollment for the coming year has surprised health care experts.
With the successful push in Congress to pass a tax plan, two of Trump’s favorite talking points about taxes — that the tax plan will be the biggest tax cut in US history and that the United States is one of the highest-taxed nations — were near the top of the list.
Trump 57 times repeated the falsehood about having the biggest tax cut in US history, even though Treasury Department data shows it would rank eighth. And 59 times Trump has claimed that the United States pays the highest corporate taxes (26 times) or that it is one of the highest-taxed nations (33 times).
The latter is false; the former is misleading, as the effective US corporate tax rate (what companies end up paying after deductions and benefits) ends up being lower than the statutory tax rate.
Trump also made many misleading claims about the investigation into possible Russian interference in the 2016 election, claiming 44 times a variation of the statement that it was a hoax perpetuated by Democrats.
The CIA, the FBI, and the National Security Agency had announced that they had ‘‘high confidence’’ that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a campaign to influence the election, with a clear preference for Trump.
Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor, was appointed by Trump’s Justice Department, and the congressional committees investigating the matter are headed by Republicans.
