SHOULD “THE POST” MAINTAIN THEIR DATABASE OF TRUMP’S FALSE CLAIMS?

…This is Mara Lago, the Florida White House where Trump had his interview with the New York Times

 

Trump is on track to exceed 2000 false claims in his first year in office.

 

On January 20, 2018, our president will complete his first year in office.

 

Now, not including all the false claims that Donald Trump made as Candidate Trump, and all the candidate’s daily falsehoods, we now have a world record of false statement by our elected fearless leader.  Based on the nation’s fact checkers, which was a need for checking that arose within the media due to a president that spouts untruths on that daily basis, the president is now on-track to exceed 2,000 false statements in his first year in office.

 

According to the fact checker’s data bases, as of January 1^st, the total was at 1,950 false claims in 347 days, or 5.6 lies per day. 

 

As we readers know, the president repeats himself often. There are now over 60 false claims that he has repeated at least three times. In the president’s latest impromptu 30-minute interview with the New York Times over the holidays (that was in his Mara Lago Florida White House), he made over 24 false or misleading claims.

 

The most repeated Trump lie that “Obamacare is dead” is actually tied for 61 times with the other lie that “he [Trump] secured business investments and job announcements”.  The CBO has made it clear that Obamacare is alive and not imploding.  (Actually, there was healthy enrollment in the ACA for 2018 that has surprised most health-care experts.)  In addition, you could easily find that Trump’s claim of securing the “business investments and jobs”, that had been previously announced and anyone could confirmed the facts with a simple Google search.

The success of the Congress to pass the ridiculous tax plan bill, two of Trump’s favorite talking points about taxes are: “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”, these false statements have now rapidly moved up the list.

 

According to the fact checkers, Trump repeated the falsehood about having the biggest tax cut 53 times, even though the Treasury Department data shows it would rank in eighth place .  It has been 58 times that Trump has claimed that the United States pays the highest corporate taxes (25 times) or that it is one of the highest-taxed nations (33 times).

 

The latter statement is 100% false, and the former is totally misleading, as the effective US corporate tax rate (due to loop-holes, what companies actually pay after deductions and benefits) ends up being about 19%.

 

There is also a fact-checker category called “Flip-Flops”.  This was developed because Trump’s “Flip-Flops” are all so glaring.  In this category, Trump spent the 2016 campaign telling supporters that the unemployment rate was really 42% and the official statistics “were phony”.  Now, on over 46 occasions, Trump has taken credit for the lowest unemployment rate in 17 years. THE TRUTH: It was already very low when he was elected, @  4.6%, the lowest in a decade, Trump’s failure to acknowledge that is highly misleading.

Another false issue with Trump is that for an amazing  85 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 ready to crash as soon as the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates.  The Fed has raised rates three times since his election, and the stock market has not plunged as Trump predicted. It has continued to rise in stock prices that had begun under President Obama in 2009. Again, Trump has never explained this shift in position on the stock market.

 

The US stock-market rise in 2017 was not unique and was mirrored in a global rise in equities. When looking at the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, it’s clear US stocks haven’t rallied as robustly as their foreign equivalents. Yet Trump loves this claim so much that he has repeated it 28 times in the 49 days since our last update,  that’s more often than every other day.

 

The fact checker’s data base is maintained by closely reading or watching Trump’s public appearances and television and radio interviews. But the interviews are very hard to keep up with, mainly because the White House does not post them on its website. In fact, a recent redesign of the White House website appears to make it difficult to find transcripts of Trump’s remarks at the White House.

It’s interesting that the original Washington Post database was supposed to be to fact check Trump’s first 100 days.

 

But with a president that tells 5.6 lies-a-day, due to popular demand, it was decided to extend it to 1 year.  Now that Trump has continued to keep up such a large level of falsehoods, they must decide if they will maintain the database of false claims for more than this first year. 

 

They are now asking the public for their opinions as to whether maintaining it remains a worthwhile endeavor.

 

My vote is a resounding “yes”, as we’ve never had such a lying president.  And for every democracy, making voting decision based on truthful information is a serious requirement.

 

Please let the Washington Post know that you feel maintaining this data base is very important.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2018