The president of people who enjoyed LL Cool J’s verse on Accidental Racist lies so much that Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler has had to introduce a new rating called the “the Bottomless Pinocchio” for politicians like Trump “who repeat a false claim so many times that they are, in effect, engaging in campaigns of disinformation.”
“Trump’s willingness to constantly repeat false claims has posed a unique challenge to fact checkers,” Kessler wrote in his Post column Monday. “Most politicians quickly drop a Four-Pinocchio claim, either out of a duty to be accurate or concern that spreading false information could be politically damaging.”
The fact-checking column attempts to debunk claims made by politicos and investigates the origins of factoids that are dropped like crumbs from a poppy seed bagel. It’s hard to imagine but in order for a politician to receive the “dubious distinction” of a Bottomless Pinocchio, they have to repeat the false claim at least 20 times and the false claim must have already received three to four Pinocchios.
It’s funny that the fact-checker column investigates all politician claims and no one other than the president of people who willingly eat boiled Brussel sprouts is the only politician to receive the bottomless Pinocchio—14 times!
“The president keeps going long after the facts are clear, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to replace the truth with his own, far more favorable, version of it,” Kessler wrote. “[Trump] is not merely making gaffes or misstating things, he is purposely injecting false information into the national conversation.”
So far, Trump has claimed 87 times that the United States pays for most of the cost of NATO. Oh, and he accused special counsel Robert Mueller staff of being “angry Democrats” on 30 separate occasions, The Hill reports.
Trump also lied some 123 about the GOP tax cut being the biggest tax cut that was “even larger than that of President Ronald Reagan,” but the Post notes that Reagan’s 1981 tax cut was more than twice as large as Trump’s.