Poor Track Record: Trump Made 30,573 False Claims as President, With Nearly 39 Per Day in Final Year

In a scathing attack on former US President Donald Trump, The Washington Post revealed that the republican leader had made a total of 30,573 false claims during his tenure as the President.

As per the publication, Trump’s assault on power began on the very first day in the office and continued to increase over the period of his reign. What began as his fabricated notion that he held the “all-time record” for appearing on the cover of Time magazine, culminated in his spreading wild theories that the coronavirus pandemic would disappear “like a miracle” and that the presidential election had been stolen.

The Washington Post reported that for more than 10 years, the Fact Checker had assessed the accuracy of claims made by politicians in both parties but Trump, with his total disregard for facts, posed a new challenge. What started as a weekly feature, “What Trump got wrong on Twitter this week” was soon enough turned into a project for Trump’s first 100 days. Then, in response to reader requests, the Trump database was maintained for four years.

An assessment of the Fact Checker database shows the rapid escalation in the rate of Trump’s dishonesty over time. Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in his third year, and 39 claim a day in his final year.

Noting Trump’s penchant for lies, presidential historian Michael Beschloss stated that “As a result of Trump’s constant lying through the presidential megaphone, more Americans are skeptical of genuine facts than ever before,”.

As per findings, nearly half of the false claims were communicated at his campaign rallies or via his now-suspended Twitter account.

Some of the claims made by the leader include, in late 2019 when he responded to the uproar over a phone call in which he urged Ukraine’s president to announce an investigation of former vice president Joe Biden with more than 1,000 false and misleading claims on the issue in just four months.

Trump touted phony metrics to claim he successfully defeated the virus, pitched ineffective “cures” and constantly attacked former President Barack Obama for alleged failures, such as leaving a “bare cupboard” of ventilators and bungling the response to the swine flu pandemic in 2009-2010.

The only time he was quiet was when he was detected having contracted the deadly virus.

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“It’s going to be a fraud,” Trump told Sean Hannity of Fox News a month before voters went to the polls. “This is a terrible thing that’s happening to our country.”

After Nov. 3, he made more than 800 false or misleading claims about election fraud, including 76 times offering some variation of “rigged election.” At his Jan. 6 speech at the Ellipse, in which he incited the attack on the Capitol, Trump made 107 false or misleading claims, almost all about the election.

One-fifth of his nearly 2,500 claims about the economy was the same falsehood that he was responsible for creating the greatest economy in U.S. history. After the coronavirus outbreak tanked the economy, he amped up the rhetoric to say he had created the greatest economy in world history.

Nearly 300 times Trump falsely said that he passed the biggest tax cut in history. Even before his tax cut was crafted, he promised that it would be the biggest in U.S. history – bigger than President Ronald Reagan’s in 1981. Reagan’s tax cut amounted to 2.9% of the gross domestic product, and none of the proposals under consideration came close to that level.

Trump’s penchant for repeating false claims is demonstrated by the fact that the Fact Checker database has recorded about 750 instances in which he has repeated a variation of the same claim at least three times.

His eccentric claims often landed him in trouble, the very last one resulting in the US Capitol siege following his impeachment on Jan 6, 2021.

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