When 2018 began, Donald Trump had made 1,989 false and misleading claims.President Donald Trump's year of lies, false statements and misleading claims started with a series of morning tweets.
Over a couple of hours Jan. 2, Trump made false claims about three of his favorite targets - Iran, The New York Times and Hillary Clinton. He also took credit for the "best and safest year on record" for commercial aviation, even though there had been no commercial plane crashes in the United States since 2009 and, in any case, the president has little to do with ensuring the safety of commercial aviation.
The fusillade of tweets was the start of a year of unprecedented deception during which Trump became increasingly unmoored from the truth. When 2018 began, the president had made 1,989 false and misleading claims, according to The Washington Post's Fact Checker's database, which tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president. By the end of the year, Trump had accumulated more than 7,600 untruths during his presidency - averaging more than 15 erroneous claims a day during 2018, almost triple the rate from the year before.
Even as Trump's fact-free statements proliferate, there is growing evidence that his approach is failing.
According to ndtv, Fewer than 3 in 10 Americans believe many of his most-common false statements, according to a Fact Checker poll from earlier this month. Only among a pool of strong Trump approvers - about 1 in 6 adults in the survey - did large majorities accept several, though not all, of his falsehoods as true.
Similarly, a November Quinnipiac poll found 58 percent of voters saying Trump wasn't honest, compared to just 36 percent who said he was honest. The same poll found 50 percent saying he is "less honest" than most previous presidents, tying his own record for the highest share of registered voters saying so in Quinnipiac polling.
"When before have we seen a president so indifferent to the distinction between truth and falsehood, or so eager to blur that distinction?" presidential historian Michael R. Beschloss said of Trump in 2018.
Beschloss noted that the constitution set very few guidelines in this regard because the expectation was that the first president would be George Washington and he would set the tone for the office. "What is it that school children are taught about George Washington? That he never told a lie," he said. "That is a bedrock expectation of a president by Americans."
Trump began 2018 on a similar pace as last year. Through May, he generally averaged about 200 to 250 false claims a month. But his rate suddenly exploded in June, when he topped 500 falsehoods, as he appeared to shift to campaign mode. He made almost 500 more in both July and August, almost 600 in September, more than 1,200 in October and almost 900 in November. In December, Trump drifted back to the mid-200s.
Trump's mid-summer acceleration came as the White House stopped having regular press briefings and the primary voice in the administration was Trump, who met repeatedly with reporters, held events, staged rallies and tweeted constantly.
Trump is among the more loquacious of recent presidents, according to Martha Kumar, professor emerita at Towson University, who keeps track of every presidential interaction with the media, dating to Ronald Reagan. Through Dec. 20, Trump held 323 short question-and-answer sessions with reporters, second only to Bill Clinton through the first 23 months, and granted 196 interviews, second to Barack Obama.
Source: ndtv.com
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