Why you always lying? Trump highkey has already told 10,000 lies as President
According to fact checkers from the Washington Post, President Trump told lie number 10,000. He hit this unsavory milestone on Friday while discussing the 2017 Charlottesville protests.
You know, the one with torch-brandishing Neo-nazis who Trump refused to condemn? The protests with “good people on both sides?” Yeah.
Interestingly, Trump’s rate of lying has increased since he first took office in Jan. 2017. Post-fact-checker Glenn Kessler notes that, in Trump’s first 100 days in office, he averaged five lies a day.
In the last seven months, that number has rocketed to 23. An article by The Guardian observes that this heightened rate of untruths coincides with the release of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s potential collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice and the lengthy government shutdown over the wall.
Coincidentally, this shutdown ended just in time for Trump to give a televised State of the Union address. You can’t prevent a reality TV star from clogging up our airwaves.
It’s not the quantity of lies. It’s the acceleration of them.https://t.co/CjtKBZTFle
— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) April 29, 2019
These Post-fact-checkers determine that approximately one-fifth of his lies have to do with immigration. For instance, at a rally in Wisconsin, Trump told attendees that “open borders bring tremendous crime.”
In reality (a place that Trump doesn’t seem to inhabit), there are many studies that show that both documented and undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens.
His most oft-repeated lie is that the wall between the U.S. and Mexico is already being built. But perhaps his most disgusting lie took place this Saturday at this same rally in Wisconsin.
Concerning late-term abortion, Trump told his devotees,
“The baby is born, the mother meets with the doctor, they take care of the baby, they wrap the baby beautifully…Then the doctor and mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby.”
Trump’s lying is so prolific that Politifact, which categorizes his statements as “True,” “Half True,” “Mostly False,” “False” or “Pants on Fire,” is thirty-four pages long.
But how useful is fact-checking when there is no discernible political cost? What does it mean that the leader of the free world has paid zero political price for his prodigious lying?
What does it mean for our democracy?
