WASHINGTON US President Donald Trump has made 8,158 false or misleading claims since taking office, a media report said on Monday, a day after he completed two years of his presidency.
The president averaged nearly 5.9 false or misleading claims a day in his first year in office. But he hit nearly 16.5 a day in his second year, almost triple the pace, The Washington Post reported. The paper quoted The Fact Checker’s database — that analyses, categorises and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president — for its report.
According to the Fact Checker’s database, Trump has made 8,158 “false or misleading claims” since taking office. That includes an astonishing 6000-plus such claims in the president’s second year, the paper said.
The president completed two years in office on Sunday. In the first 100 days, the president made 492 unsupported claims. He managed to top that number just in the first three weeks of 2019. In October, as he was barnstorming the country in advance of the mid-term elections, he made more than 1200 false or misleading claims, it said.
The biggest source of misleading claims is immigration, with a tally that has grown with the addition of 300 immigration claims in the past three weeks, for a total of 1,433, the report said.
“We started this project as part of our coverage of the president’s first 100 days, largely because we could not possibly keep up with the pace and volume of the president’s misstatements,” the paper said.
Claims about foreign policy (900) and trade (854) rank second and third, followed by claims about the economy (790) and jobs (755). But there’s also a grab-bag category of “miscellaneous” (899), which includes misleading attacks on the media or people the president perceives as enemies, the report said.
There were only 82 days — or about 11 per cent of the time — on which we recorded no claims. These were often days when the president golfed, it said. But there were also 74 days, or about 10 per cent of his presidency, in which Trump made more than 30 claims.
These were often days when he held campaign-style rallies, riffing without much of a script, the report said. Trump has made many misleading claims about the investigation into possible Russian interference in the 2016 election, claiming 192 times a variation of the statement that it was a hoax perpetuated by Democrats, it said.
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