There have been only two straight weeks in Donald Trump’s presidency when he hasn’t told a lie, according to a new study by the New York Times. The longest consecutive stretches he’s managed to stay truthful are a twelve day stretch in May, and fifteen days this month.
The Times not only tallied up every lie Trump has told in his Presidency, from the first on January 21st, (“I wasn’t a fan of Iraq. I didn’t want to go into Iraq.”) to the most recent on June 21st (“Right now, we are one of the highest-taxed nations in the world.”), they also helpfully mapped the public lies on a calendar. Some of the most lie-intensive weeks included the first week of his Presidency (7 lies) and the week of February 5th (10 lies from Sunday to Sunday with breaks on Wednesday and Saturday).
The scale of Trump’s truth problem gets really astounding when the Times breaks it down by lies vs. falsehoods, defining lies as “demonstrably false statements” rather than falsehoods which are “misleading statements” or exaggerations. By the Times’ count, Trump said “something untrue, in public, every day for the first 40 days of his presidency. The streak didn’t end until March 1. Since then, he has said something untrue on at least 74 of 113 days.” Why the occasional breaks? The number crunchers correlated falsehood-free, lie-less days with times when Trump wasn’t on Twitter or went on vacation.
It seems the public has caught on to the trend. James Comey testified under oath that he took such detailed memos of his interactions with Trump because of “the nature of the person…I was honestly concerned that he might lie.’ He also said “the administration then chose to defame me and, more importantly, the FBI by saying that the organization was in disarray, that it was poorly led, that the workforce had lost confidence in its leader,” adding “those were lies, plain and simple.” Or there is United Steelworkers 1999 president Chuck Jones, who said of the Carrier deal Trump and Pence touted before the inauguration, “For whatever reason, [Trump] lied his a– off.”
The fact of the matter is that the longer Trump is in office, the more lies he tells, and the more the public’s rating of his honesty drops. A current poll by Quinnipiac shows that over half of Americans—a full 60%— say the president is dishonest. Considering President Trump has told 100 lies in 155 days, the public has good reason for their opinion. Sad!
(Via New York Times)