For some reason, our year-long project analyzing, categorizing and tracking every false or misleading claim by President Trump had seemed like quite a burden in the past month. Well, the numbers are in and now we know why: In the past 35 days, Trump has averaged an astonishing nine claims a day.
The total now stands at 1,628 claims in 298 days, or an average of 5.5 claims a day. That puts the president on track to reach 1,999 claims by the end of his first year in office, though he obviously would easily exceed 2,000 if he maintained the pace of the past month. (Our full interactive graphic can be found here.)
As regular readers know, the president has a tendency to repeat himself — often. There are now at least 50 claims that he has repeated three or more times.
Trump’s most repeated claim, uttered 60 times, was some variation of the statement that the Affordable Care Act is dying and “essentially dead.” The Congressional Budget Office has said that the Obamacare exchanges, despite well-documented issues, are not imploding and are expected to remain stable for the foreseeable future. Indeed, healthy enrollment for the coming year has surprised health-care experts.
Trump also repeatedly takes credit for events or business decisions that happened before he took the oath of office — or had even been elected. Fifty-five times, he has touted that he secured business investments and job announcements that had been previously announced and could easily be found with a Google search.
But with the push in Congress to pass a tax plan, two of Trump’s favorite talking points about taxes — 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 — have been moving up the list.
Trump repeated the falsehood about having the biggest tax cut 40 times, even though Treasury Department data shows it would only rank eighth. And 50 times Trump has claimed that the United States pays the highest corporate taxes (19 times) or that it is one of the highest-taxed nations (31 times). The latter is false; the former is misleading, as the effective U.S. corporate tax rate (what companies end up paying after deductions and benefits) ends up being lower than the statutory tax rate.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...er-298-days/?tid=sm_fb&utm_term=.fd6a321b4b28
The total now stands at 1,628 claims in 298 days, or an average of 5.5 claims a day. That puts the president on track to reach 1,999 claims by the end of his first year in office, though he obviously would easily exceed 2,000 if he maintained the pace of the past month. (Our full interactive graphic can be found here.)
As regular readers know, the president has a tendency to repeat himself — often. There are now at least 50 claims that he has repeated three or more times.
Trump’s most repeated claim, uttered 60 times, was some variation of the statement that the Affordable Care Act is dying and “essentially dead.” The Congressional Budget Office has said that the Obamacare exchanges, despite well-documented issues, are not imploding and are expected to remain stable for the foreseeable future. Indeed, healthy enrollment for the coming year has surprised health-care experts.
Trump also repeatedly takes credit for events or business decisions that happened before he took the oath of office — or had even been elected. Fifty-five times, he has touted that he secured business investments and job announcements that had been previously announced and could easily be found with a Google search.
But with the push in Congress to pass a tax plan, two of Trump’s favorite talking points about taxes — 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 — have been moving up the list.
Trump repeated the falsehood about having the biggest tax cut 40 times, even though Treasury Department data shows it would only rank eighth. And 50 times Trump has claimed that the United States pays the highest corporate taxes (19 times) or that it is one of the highest-taxed nations (31 times). The latter is false; the former is misleading, as the effective U.S. corporate tax rate (what companies end up paying after deductions and benefits) ends up being lower than the statutory tax rate.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...er-298-days/?tid=sm_fb&utm_term=.fd6a321b4b28
But the world simply is not black and white.