Since the day President Donald Trump set foot in the Oval Office he has planted a pasture of untruths that grows bigger with each passing day.
Seven months into the job, Trump has spoken a lie a whopping 1,057 times, according to The Washington Post’s fact-checking team.
It means the president has uttered a falsehood an average of five times per day since his inauguration on Jan. 20 — and he’s only quickening his pace. At the six-month mark, Trump was averaging 4.6 lies per day. At his current rate, he’ll hit his 2,000th lie by the end of his first year in office.
Trump started his presidency out on an untruthful foot almost immediately by claiming (more than once) that the crowd at his inauguration was the biggest ever, despite numerous aerial images showing it was clearly smaller than the crowd that greeted former President Barack Obama at his inauguration in 2009.
That first lie led the Trump administration down a long and winding path of one “alternative fact” after another — Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase two days after Trump took the Oval Office.
But it hasn’t stopped there — more than 30 of the Trump’s false statements have been repeated three or more times.
“Obamacare, as one of the big insurance companies had said, is in a spiral. It’s in a death spiral. It is dead.”
This is, by far, Trump’s favorite lie. He has also claimed the Affordable Healthcare Act is “dying” or “exploding” — a claim the Congressional Budget Office has refuted, concluding the Obamacare exchanges have issues, but are expected to remain stable for the foreseeable future.
Trump has uttered this falsehood 50 times.
“ExxonMobil is going to be investing $20 billion in the Gulf Coast and the Gulf Coast region. … This was something that was done to a large extent because of our policies and the policies of this new administration having to do with regulators and so many other things.”
This is one example of a pattern by Trump to take credit for business decisions and deals that happened months before he took the oath of office or even before his election. In the case of ExxonMobil, the company began making the investments in 2013, long before Trump’s March announcement.
“I was able to get $600 million approximately off those [F-35 fighter planes].”
Trump announced the cost cut on Jan. 30, but manufacturer, Lockheed, already had planned cost reductions, announcing in a Dec. 19 briefing costs would come down “significantly.” That was weeks before Trump started meeting with the companies.
