Six weeks after the Washington Post’s fact-checkers reported he has lied more than 5,000 times in office, President Trump said, “I always try to tell the truth.”
He was talking to ABC News, responding to video of the 2016 campaign in which he said, “In this journey, I will never lie to you.”
“I do try,” said Trump. “I always want to tell the truth. When I can, I tell the truth. Sometimes it turns out to be where something happens that’s different or there’s a change, but I always like to be truthful.”
The New York Times, the Toronto Star and Politifact have also tallied the president’s lies and misleading statements since taking office. Numerical totals vary, depending on the frequency of their updates, but all report that Trump has told exponentially more lies than any other president at every point in his term.
And Trump tells many of the same lies repeatedly — even after he has been publicly notified that the statements are untrue. Even when he is asked about his statements which have been captured on video, Trump will deny making them or say he said something different.
The president’s lying has increased during the midterm campaign, both in number and scale. Today in the White House, Trump said that 15,000 members of the military would be deployed to the U.S.-Mexico border to guard against the “migrant caravan,” a group of refugees fleeing violence in Central America who might reach the border in two months to apply for asylum. The Pentagon denies both the deployment numbers and the security threat posed by refugees seeking political asylum.
Trump’s approach to truth has been adopted by several Republicans in the midterm election campaign. In ads and interviews, Senate candidate Rep. Martha McSally (R-AZ) and House incumbent Rep. Dana Rohrbacher (R-CA) have said they support Americans’ ability to buy health insurance regardless of pre-existing health conditions.
In reality, both McSally and Rohrbacher have voted repeatedly to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the first and only legislation that has protected Americans’ right to coverage regardless of pre-existing conditions, which was authored by Democrats. If repeal had been successful, no legislation or proposal would have protected that right.
Trump has made his own false statements about health care. In the ABC News interview, Trump said Democrats were going to “destroy health care as we know it” so that it would be unobtainable. In reality, Democrats have consistently defended the Affordable Care Act, while Republicans have voted more than 70 times to repeal it.
In office, Trump has made repeated moves to weaken the Act, canceling subsidies to insurers and spurring Republicans to repeal the law’s individual mandate, which has destabilized the marketplace and raised premiums for 2019. He has supported a pending lawsuit filed by 20 Republican governors which would declare the ACA invalid, canceling protections for those with pre-existing conditions.
