Can we start taking bets on how many lies he will tell today?
Confessions of a Trump Fact-Checker
What we’re experiencing from Trump is a daily avalanche of wrongness. The essential truth of this election cannot be conveyed with an examination of any one particular chunk of ice. The story is the massive accumulation of nonsense, big stuff and little stuff alike, day after day.
The fewest inaccuracies I’ve heard in any day is four. The most is 25. (Twenty-five!) That doesn’t include the first two debates, at which I counted 34 and 33, respectively. Over the course of 33 days, I counted a total of 253 (including some that repeat).
During the Toronto mayoral election two years ago, the bombastic blond media-bashing conservative-populist outsiders—yes, Toronto finds the Trump phenomenon eerily familiar—made so many false claims that I decided the only way to convey the truth of the election was with the blunt, accessible tool of a list. A typical headline on the “Campaign Lie Detector” fact-check feature I hastily invented: “Doug Ford says 21 inaccurate things during radio appearance.”
It occurred to me this September, during a particularly outrageous and dishonest Trump Thursday, that the lie detector needed to be reincarnated. I had a third once-in-a-lifetime liar on my hands—and this one was even worse.
My first day making a Trump lie list, September 15, I counted 12 false claims. Among them: Trump falsely claimed again to have opposed the Iraq War, falsely claimed that Clinton’s campaign invented the phrase “alt-right,” falsely described his rocky visit to a church in Flint, Michigan, falsely claimed his poll numbers with black voters were skyrocketing and falsely claimed Hispanic poverty has worsened under the Obama administration.
Reporters noted some of this on Twitter. But the fact-checking largely stayed confined to personal social media accounts, out of articles and cable segments and corporate feeds seen by many more people. These are some of the headlines Trump got that day: “Donald Trump reveals more details of his tax plan.” “Donald Trump releases one-page summary of medical records.” “Donald Trump: The Fed Is Very Political.”
That is perfectly understandable. All of the above is real news. Other than the Iraq lie, which was already old news by then, none of his false claims was, in itself, tremendously significant.
But I think they added up to something crucial. All together, one of the day’s most important news items was really this: “Candidate makes up a whole bunch of things in rapid succession for no particular reason.” It went largely untold.
That’s why I include in my lists even the small errors that provide easy fodder for the Trump supporters (and sometimes non-supporters) who accuse me of pedantic nitpicking. While I’d make the lists more unimpeachable if I stuck to the big falsehoods, I think the accumulation of little ones is sometimes just as revealing.
Trump, for example, likes to read the lyrics to the song “The Snake” as an allegory for the supposed danger posed by Muslim refugees. He has repeatedly claimed it was written by singer Al Wilson, who performed it in the late 1960s. In fact, it was written in the early 1960s by Oscar Brown Jr., the late singer and civil rights activist, whose family has asked Trump to stop using it.
Some Trump supporters chortle when I point this out. But it matters to the Browns, and I think it tells us something about this potential president. Every politician sometimes gets things wrong about complicated issues, sometimes practices evasive dishonesty. Trump gets things wrong all the time, pointlessly, about almost everything, and almost never corrects himself. Even if he’s not intentionally lying, he’s habitually erring. At very least, it suggests a serial carelessness with facts and a serial resistance to conceding error. Both traits seem relevant to the discussion of who should be commander-in-chief.
Confessions of a Trump Fact-Checker - POLITICO Magazine
