President Trump makes so many false statements on a daily basis that it seems impossible to process them all. He lied about the president’s birthplace. He lied about widespread voter fraud. He literally lied about the weather. The total count of Trump lies is now close to 300.
Yet the Toronto “Star” is endeavoring to keep track. Their comprehensive, regularly updated database compiles Trump’s falsehoods by category, such as “President Barack Obama” and “The economy.” There are 294 so far, including 24 on his Russia ties, many repeated multiple times. (If you could repeated false claims in that tally, the total number rises to 42.) Here are some of the highlights:
May 18
“The other is something I can only tell you: there was no collusion. And everybody – even my enemies have said, there is no collusion.”
Truth: Trump’s enemies have not said this
May 13
“Everybody also agrees it (Russia’s hacking) didn’t change the election. Didn’t change it at all. So that’s important. That’s important to me.”
Truth: Many people – including much of the Democratic Party – do not agree. While the true impact of the Russian hacking is impossible to prove either way, it is inaccurate to say there is a consensus view that it was inconsequential.
April 23
“When WikiLeaks came out … never heard of WikiLeaks, never heard of it.”
Truth: Trump had heard of WikiLeaks years before the organization published emails that had been hacked from Democratic Party officials in 2016. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski discovered a 2010 interview in which Trump had described WikiLeaks as “disgraceful.”
April 2
“You know if you issue hundreds of tweets, and every once in a while you have a clinker, that’s not so bad. Now my last tweet, you know the one that you are talking about perhaps, was the one about being in quotes wire tapped, meaning surveilled. Guess what, it is turning out to be true.”
Truth: It is not turning out to be true. Nobody has produced evidence to support it; the leaders of the FBI and NSA say they have seen no corroborating evidence, as have Republican leaders in Congress.
March 20
“The NSA and FBI tell Congress that Russia did not influence electoral process.”
Truth: The leaders of the NSA and FBI did not say this to Congress. Trump was fact-checked in real time by FBI Director James Comey; asked about this tweet, Comey said, “We’ve offered no opinion.”
February 16
“The failing New York Times wrote a big, long front-page story yesterday. And it was very much discredited, as you know.”
Truth: The article, headlined “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence,” has not been discredited.
