On This Day In 2020
16,000
OTDI 2020, Trump tells the 16,000th lie of his presidency. Here at OTDI, we don’t want to focus on his lies. After all, there were simply too many of them. During his term he made 30,573 “false or misleading claims,” according to the Fact Checkers at the Washington Post.*
That’s an average of 21 lies every day he was president.
Please think about that for a second. Telling 21 lies on the first day…and then doing it again, 1,459 more times? Can you imagine trying to do that yourself? Would you run out of stuff to say by Day…7? How could you make up that much BS, day after day…and get half the country to believe you?
There have been roughly 100 billion people who have ever lived. To the best of our knowledge, of those 100 billion humans, Donald John Trump is literally the biggest documented liar in the history of planet Earth.
Why is that important?
The WaPo Fact Checkers do an excellent job of explaining the impacts of his lies. They talk about how his lies lead directly to death, mistrust, and the animosity that Americans feel towards each other. We don’t have the space to reprint their piece here, but we encourage you to read it now for yourself, as they are more eloquent than we can be: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trump-fact-checker-book/2020/06/01/c6323b88-a435-11ea-b619-3f9133bbb482_story.html
In the meanwhile, a few editorial comments from us:
How can you ever believe him when he’s not lying? If it’s just a coin flip whether he’s telling the truth, it would be foolish to assume anything he says is true.
If his supporters knew ahead of time that he was going to lie 30,573 times as president, do you think they would have still voted for him in ‘16? Not likely. And that would have spared our nation the four years of horrific policies he enacted.
It gives permission for his followers to lie too. His believers still look to Trump to set their moral tone. And if HE says it’s okay to lie without remorse, then it must be okay for everybody to do so.
* To be technical, some folks like the WaPo sometimes refer to them as “false or misleading statements.” We believe in common parlance those are “lies,” and are mostly not inadvertent misstatements. So that’s a term we use here at OTDI.
When Trump became a politician and his lies started to actually matter, many media outlets seemed bashful about calling them “lies.” As it if were somehow improper to refer to statements of a presidential candidate that way. After all, nobody had ever seen a public figure make stuff up before on such an extraordinary scale. So it took the media years to figure out how to accurately describe them. “Lie” is the best term.
The amazing work of @GlennKesslerWP, @rizzoTK, @mmkelly22 and the WaPo Fact Checkers is summarized here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years/
Check out their book and analyses “Donald Trump and his Assault on Truth” You can buy it here on Amazon: https://amzn.to/48oIiwZ
Trump biggest documented liar in human history
