PRESIDENT ON-TRACK TO TELL 2000 LIES HIS FIRST YEAR

…Our “Liar-in-Chief” 

Trump even thinks that Fact Checkers are “Fake News”!

 

Well, the Washington Post Fact Checkers (WAPO) have given us an update on the truthfulness...excuse me, the lack of truthfulness, coming from our president.

 

Here is the latest situations of the untruths that come out of the president mouth since the first day he became president..

 

Per the WAPO Fact Checkers that include Glenn Kessler, Nicole Lewis, and Meg Kelly.  “President Trump has made 1,628 false or misleading claims over his first 298 days.”

 

Per Meg Kelly: “For some reason, our year-long project analyzing, categorizing and tracking every false or misleading claim by President Trump seemed like quite a burden over the past month. Well, the numbers are in and now we know why: In the past 35 days, Trump has averaged an astonishing nine false claims a day.”

 

The overall average gives us 5.5 false claims a day. That puts the president on track to reach 1,999 false claims by the end of his first year in office.  However, he obviously would easily exceed 2,000 for the first year if he maintained the his pace of the past month.

 

Part of the president’s problem is that he not only tells falsehoods, he also has the tendency to repeat the same lies over and over again.  There are now at least 50 false claims that he has repeated three or more times.

 

Trump’s most repeated claim, uttered 60 times, was a variation of the statement that “The Affordable Care Act is dying and is essentially dead.” The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has said more than once that the Obamacare exchanges, despite well-documented negative problems, are not imploding and are expected to remain stable for the foreseeable future. Indeed, exceedingly healthy enrollment for the coming year has surprised all health-care experts.

 

Trump also repeatedly takes credit for events or business decisions that happened well before he took the oath of office, or before he had even been elected. Fifty-five times, he has stated that he secured business investments and job announcements that had been previously announced and could easily be found with anyone doing a Google search.

 

But with Congress trying pass a tax plan, two of Trump’s favorite false talking points are about taxes.  They are his saying that the tax plan will be the biggest tax cut in U.S. history, and that the United States is one of the highest-taxed nations.  Those falsehoods have been moving up the list.

 

Trump has repeated these lies about having the biggest tax cut over 40 times, even though his own Treasury Department data shows it would only rank in the eighth position. He has repeated 50 times that the United States pays the highest corporate taxes or that it is one of the highest-taxed nations. The latter is false; the former is misleading, as the “effective US corporate tax” after using all the loop-holes, ends up being lower than the statutory rate at 18.3%.

 

The checkers also track Trump’s flip-flops and they are glaring. He spent the 2016 campaign telling supporters that the unemployment rate was really 42% and that the official statistics were phony.  Now, on 33 occasions he has hailed the lowest unemployment rate in 17 years. (This lowest unemployment rate he uses is from the same group that he accused of it formerly being a phony rate.)  It was already very low when he was elected at 4.6%, the lowest in a decade, so his failure to acknowledge that fact is totally misleading.

 

Fifty-seven times, Trump has celebrated a rise in the stock market, even though in the campaign he repeatedly said it was only a “bubble” that was going to crash as soon as the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates. Well, the Fed did raise rates three times since the election, and it has not dive as Trump predicted. It has continued a rise in stock prices that began under President Obama in 2009.

 

Again, the president never explained his shift in position on the stock market, and he couldn’t stop talking about it during his trip to Asia.

 

The checkers maintain the Trump database by reading or watching Trump’s many public appearances and his television and radio interviews. The interviews are very hard to keep up with, because the White House does not post them on its official website.  In addition, Trump’s team tends to only seek out right-leaning interviewers who rarely question him when he repeats falsehoods that have already been fact-checked. Therefore, the interviews often contain a list of misleading claims, and these "so called journalists" are not confronting the president about his false rhetoric.

It was amazing and telling when Trump was caught stating a lie by the leader of another nation on his Asia trip.

 

On Nov. 13, Trump met with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull when he started to repeat one of his favorite false claims, that being that the United States has “deficits with almost everybody.”

 

“Except us,” interjected Turnbull.

“Except with you,” Trump sheepishly agreed, but he added: “You’re the only one,” he suggested, and that he should check the figures, but Turnbull responded assuring him, “It’s real.”

 

PM Turnbull was correct.  The United States has a trade surplus of $13 billion and service trade surpluses of $15 billion with Australia, largely because of a Free Trade Agreement, according to the Office of the US Trade Representative.  (And Trump says all former trade agreements are unfair to the United States.)

 

And Trump was also wrong when he said Australia was “the only one “ with a trade surplus.

 

For the record, the United States also has trade surpluses with: the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Belgium, Singapore, Hong Kong, Chile, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, among other countries.  This is according to the International Trade Commission.

 

All this lying will only stop when Trumps leaves the White House for good.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017