If President Donald Trump keeps lying at the rate that he’s been, he’s on pace to break his daily quota of lies set in his first two years in office.
According to the Washington Post Fact Checker, the president of people who believe that he’s actually a billionaire showed up at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday and showed out. Trump delivered a two-hour long speech that was chock full of lies, so much so that he has upped his daily lying average.
In his first year in office, the president lied some 5.9 times, which is actually decent considering he tripled that number to 16.5 a day in his second year. This year, he’s on pace to hit 22 false or misleading statements (read, lies) a day.
From the Post:
As of the end of March 3, the 773rd day of his term in office, Trump accumulated 9,014 fishy claims, according to The Fact Checker’s databasethat analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president.
Trump’s performance at CPAC is emblematic of his version of the truth during his presidency — a potent mix of exaggerated numbers, unwarranted boasting and outright falsehoods. His speech helped push March 3 to his fourth-biggest day for false or misleading claims, totaling 104.
The speech included his greatest hits: 131 times he has falsely said he passed the biggest tax cut in history, 126 times he has falsely said his border wall is already being built and 116 times he has asserted that the U.S. economy today is the best in history. All three of those claims are on The Fact Checker’s list of Bottomless Pinocchios, as well as other claims Trump made during his CPAC speech.
The Post included some of the wildly untrue claims the president made during his longwinded speech, like this:
“A state called Michigan, where — by the way — where Fiat Chrysler just announced a four and a half billion dollar incredible expansion and new plant doubling their workforce. Many, many car companies have moved back to Michigan and are continuing to do so.”
Fiat Chrysler did announce this expansion in Michigan, but Trump leaves out that it announced 1,500 layoffs in Illinois at the same time. It’s a big exaggeration to say many car companies have moved back to Michigan, though Chrysler has announced several new investments there under Trump.
And this:
“When the wind stops blowing, that’s the end of your electric.”
Nope. Wind turbines do not generate power when there’s no wind, but the power grid can handle this variability.
And this:
“We never had an empty seat. We went out and helped Ted Cruz. We went out and helped so many people. And I’ll tell you what, if we didn’t do those 32 rallies — and it wasn’t easy when you’re doing rallies with 25, 30 thousand people.”
There were empty seats at Trump’s Houston rally with Cruz. “Many hundreds of seats were empty, including all of the boxes on both tiers of the mezzanine,” the Dallas Morning News reported.
Once Trump is voted out of office in 2020 (looking at you, one of the 1,348 Democrats who are running for office) he can look back on his time in the White House and be proud that he was the greatest liar to ever do it.