The Washington Post, in an effort to track President Donald Trump’s false or misleading claims, has created a Fact Checker’s database that analyzes and categorizes his false statements.
The Post created the database in the first 100 days of Trump’s presidency, and readers demanded that the paper continue on with the project.
To date, Trump has made more than 16,200 false or misleading claims. In 2017, he made 1,999 false claims, an average of six per day. In 2018, Trump made 5,689 false or misleading statements, an average of 16 a day. And in 2019, he made 8,155 false statements, an average of 22 per day.
The most repeated misstatement, 257 times, is that the economy is the best it’s ever been in history. But as the Post notes, the U.S. economy has done better under Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton.
Other falsehoods that Trump has repeatedly uttered is some version of a statement that the U.S. is building a wall on the border of Mexico (242 times), that his tax cut is the biggest in history (184 times), and that the U.S. has “lost” money on trade deficits (176 times).
The Post’s database, which has an extremely fast search engine, recently added a new feature that provides a URL for every claim that is fact-checked.
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