President Trump has told more than 7,500 lies and untruths during his time in office, the Washington Post reported Friday.
As of Dec. 20, the 700th day of Trump’s presidency, the exact total is 7,546.
That’s according to the Post’s Fact Checker blog, which has been keeping a running tally of the president’s lies and false or misleading statements since the beginning of his presidency in January 2017.
They found that Trump’s untruths reached a peak in October, as he crisscrossed the country campaigning for Republican candidates in the midterm elections. He made 1,205 false claims then. The second-biggest total was in November, with 806.
Trump has told some of the same untruths so many times that the Post had to revise its well-known Pinocchio scale, a one-to-five rating that measures the falsity of a politician’s statements. This month, the Bottomless Pinocchio was unveiled for Trump.
“He has his greatest hits: 124 times he had falsely said he passed the biggest tax cut in history, 110 times he has asserted that the U.S. economy today is the best in history, and 92 times he has falsely said his border wall is already being built,” the Post said, noting that they all achieved the Bottomless rating.
Trump has lied or misled most about immigration, with 1,076 untruths told.
A Dec. 16 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 62 percent of Americans believe that Trump hasn’t been honest about the Russia investigation, up from 56 percent in August.
A Nov. 20 Quinnipiac poll found that 58 percent of Americans believe Trump is not honest in general. Thirty-six percent disagreed. “Not honest, not level headed, not empathetic. The surging economy is offset by deep questions about the president’s character and conduct,” said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll.
