Before President Donald Trump was a phony real estate mogul or a serial adulterer, he was a liar. Rumor has it that as a child, before his horns were fully developed, baby Trump lied about pooping in his diaper. As a teen he lied about being the product of a mixed relationship and swore that one of his parents was orange. As a college student, Trump lied about owning a souped-up Camaro and having a girlfriend who went to a nearby college.
The one constant in Trump’s life is that he will lie about any and everything. He will lie about lying and then lie about that. Even when caught, he will keep up the lie or claim that he never said the initial lie, which is also a lie, and then he will lie some more.
The good people over at the Washington Post know that Trump and the truth get along about as well as T’Challa and Killmonger, so they’ve been charting the president’s mistruths, from little white lie to full-on whopper, and the results are staggering.
According to the Post, on May 1, the president had been in office 466 days and had told 3,001 lies, an average of 6.4 fibs a day.
Dis fibber here.
Here’s how the Post breaks it down:
Trump has a proclivity to repeat, over and over, many of his false or misleading statements. We’ve counted at least 113 claims that the president has repeated at least three times, some with breathtaking frequency.
Seventy-two times, the president has falsely claimed he passed the biggest tax cut in history — when in fact it ranks in eighth place. Fifty-three times, the president has made some variation of the claim that the Russia probe is a made-up controversy. (If you include other claims about the Russia probe that are not accurate, the count goes to 90.) Forty-one times, the president has offered a variation of the false claim that Democrats do not really care about the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that Trump terminated.
Thirty-four times, the president has wrongly asserted that a border wall was needed to stop the flow of drugs across the southern border, even though the Drug Enforcement Administration says a wall would not limit this illegal trade, as much of it travels through legal borders or under tunnels unaffected by any possible physical barrier.
Thirteen times in the past five weeks, Trump has claimed his long-promised border wall is already being built, even though Congress denied him the funding and prohibited the use of prototypes he had viewed with great fanfare.
The Post notes that the president doesn’t lie every day—well, he doesn’t tweet or make a public statement every day—but when he does hit the Twitters, speak to the press or address his followers, he makes up for lost time.
Like April 28, when he gave an 80-minute speech in Michigan. In this speech alone, Trump spouted 44 claims that have been proved to fall somewhere on the mistruth meter.
For example: “He took credit for 3 million jobs ‘since the election,’ even though he did not become president until almost three months later. About 2.5 million jobs have been created since Trump took the oath of office,” the Post reports.
CNN notes that the biggest problem with having a liar in chief is that there is no way to really contextualize it. Former presidents may have lied during their respective terms, but no one has lied with the frequency and carelessness of Trump.
News outlets didn’t have a fact checker combing through former President Barack Obama’s speeches because they didn’t need to. But I’m willing to bet that Trump is the lyingest liar to ever sit behind the desk in the Oval Office and put his Diet Coke directly on the table, no coaster.
Trump’s lies are moving so fast that it’s hard to keep up. According to the Military Times, Trump falsely claimed Wednesday that his administration was giving service members a pay raise for the “first time in 10 years,” when, in fact, the members of the armed forces receive a 1 percent increase yearly. Trump also claimed that the 2.4 percent pay raise approved by Congress earlier this year was a “big raise,” when it was the federally required amount, the Military Times reported.
All of this brings Trump’s final lie totals somewhere around the 4,589,345 mark, but don’t quote me on that number.