[image_credit]REUTERS/Carlos Barria[/image_credit][image_caption]Former President Donald Trump[/image_caption]
It’s a staggering number, which Kessler writes “became an untruth tracker for the ages, widely cited around the world as a measuring stick of Trump’s presidency.”
Four years is 1,460 days. So it comes to more than 20 falsehoods a day, although obviously views can differ of exactly where lies the line between a slip of a tongue, an exaggeration, a knowing lie, or a habitual liar just flapping his gums.
Of course there were other fact-check operations operating during the Trump years, many of which I esteem highly. But Kessler and his team gained my trust early and never lost it. So I’ll pass along below a link to his final report, in which he announces that his team will no longer run regular fact checks of Trump’s statements.
Personally, I was truly and utterly shocked at Trump’s mendacity. The lies were so frequent, so blatant. And yet, despite my expectation early on that no president’s credibility or effectiveness could survive under such a steady stream of falsehoods, I was secondarily shocked that Trump’s approval rating never seemed to change. It was a bad rating – generally around 40 percent approval. And I thought it should have been much lower. But after the early days of his term, it stayed steady. It actually pained me to see a president lie this much and apparently suffer little or no decline in his followership.
I’m someone who places a high value on factual accuracy. It’s a professional habit. In my 30 years at the Star Tribune, the ombudsman caught me in two factual errors (in one of them of them I accurately quoted a very famous source saying something that wasn’t true, but I should have checked it). Still, they both stung. Journalists of my generation treated factual accuracy as the North Star, the first and most sacred necessity.
Maybe that changed me, or maybe it’s just the way I am, but during the early Trump years I kept waiting for him to lose followers, which would be measured by a declining approval rating, just because he was such a frequent and blatant liar. But it never happened. Seeing that shocked me, even hurt me at first. Then I became relatively numb to it, but not all that numb. And I never got very far in understanding whether his loyal approvers were unaware that he lied to them constantly, or knew it but just didn’t care.
The new media, cable TV and online environment — in which more and more citizens easily can and generally do turn to sources of information that share their biases and perhaps avert their eyes from those that might tell them that Trump was the biggest liar in presidential history — must surely be a factor. But the whole thing creeps me out. We’ll see whether it’s the new normal. A great many would-be successors to Trump seem to be embracing a similar disregard for factual accuracy.
According to the Post Fact Checker operation, the pace of Trump’s falsehoods actually increased, with nearly half of his falsehoods coming in his last year in office. I don’t take that too literally. Obviously, views can differ on what constitutes a falsehood or a lie. But there’s no doubt in my mind that Trump erased the norm that it’s a big deal for a president to lie to the American people, and that he will pay a serious price for constant lying. Maybe it can be restored. That, also, is above my pay scale.
Here’s a little taste of Kessler’s final Trump report:
For more than 10 years, The Fact Checker has assessed the accuracy of claims made by politicians in both parties, and that practice will continue. But Trump, with his unusually flagrant disregard for facts, posed a new challenge, as so many of his claims did not merit full-fledged fact checks. What started as a weekly feature — “What Trump got wrong on Twitter this week” — turned into a project for Trump’s first 100 days. Then, in response to reader requests, the Trump database was maintained for four years, despite the increasing burden of keeping it up.
The database became an untruth tracker for the ages, widely cited around the world as a measuring stick of Trump’s presidency — and as of noon Wednesday it was officially retired.
Fact Checker Kessler’s full good-bye-to-Trump-and-his-falsehoods is here. Please let this not become the new normal.
That’s 20 per day, 140 per week, and over 7000 per year, and that doesn’t include his golf score.
His supporters don’t care about the lies, for three reasons. The first is that they “really aren’t lies,” because contradictory information is just fake news. The second is that they dismiss them as something that just happens in politics (“If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor – what about that?”). The volume of lies is not important.
The third, and perhaps most important, reason is that they enjoy them. They enjoy seeing the libs aggravated, and as far as the broader implications of finding such glee in an elected official who lies so repeatedly and with so little apparent effort, see the prior two reasons.
You would think a serial liar’s claims that an election was stolen from him would be immediately discounted by almost all people. Yet, this lie to top all of the others seems to be taken as truth by millions. I still have a hard time believing there are that many dolts. I thank RB for providing some “rational” reasons why people profess to believe what comes out of this sociopath’s mouth. Not sure it accounts for the traitorous idiots storming the Capitol; but I think RB certainly nails why Fox, the rest of right-wing media, and those flag-waving politicians continue the charade. “Democracy” to them means holding onto power over the left above all else.
I would just add no president in history has had their words parsed as much, and with such obvious bias, as Trump. He enjoyed (to his detriment) a freewheeling style. He would have been much better off with the Biden strategy of a fawning media and never holding press conferences.
Hmmm… “…no president in history…?” Trump certainly had his utterances put under a microscope, but after an initial period – say, six months or so – that microscopic examination became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. As a huckster from the get-go, my suspicion is that Trump’s attitude was much like the Hollywood cliché – “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” Any attention was better than no attention, and Trump obviously likes attention. At least, that seems to have been his attitude up to the present. When prosecutors and jurors start paying a lot of attention to him, he may like the limelight somewhat less.
The claim of “bias” has little basis in fact. Trump was certainly not treated worse by “mainstream” media than his predecessor was treated by an admittedly biased Fox “news.” Clinton had numerous media critics, print and electronic, as did both George W. and George H. W. Bush. And so on, back through the decades. Conservative newspapers fulminated for many, many years over FDR, largely to no avail, and the first president I actually have personal memories of was Harry Truman, who was not universally loved, outside, perhaps, of his native Missouri, where I grew up. Trump grew demonstrably angry at media outlets that did nothing more than quote him accurately, which is less about bias and more about Presidential ego.
I’m inclined to agree that Biden is currently enjoying something of a honeymoon with the media, at least in part because, except for reliably right-wing outlets, the media were regularly disparaged by his predecessor. That said, however, a media honeymoon has a fairly long history with new Presidents. That Trump never seems to have had much of one has much to do, at least in my view, with the fact that he quickly followed up a campaign notable for the severity and frequency of its lies with an almost comic stereotype of perpetual and constant lying that came to characterize him and his administration.
As for press conferences, let’s give Mr. Biden at least 3 months in office before we start tossing accusations about avoidance. He’s been in office about 6 weeks.
Already set the record for longest time without a press conference. I guess if I didn’t know who my Secretary of Defense was I wouldn’t hold one either.
With Biden sitting at a 60% approval rating, something must be going right.
Uh, no. That record was set at over 300 days in 2020.
Of all our presidents, Trump is perhaps the one who held the fewest press conferences. In fact, in the last two years of his disastrous presidency, I don’t think he held one, and even his press secretary stopped meeting with reporters.
Trump used Twitter to communicate–if that’s what he was doing–with his pubic. Plus those shouted-while-the-helicopter-blades -whirred exchanges with press.
Trump’s cult followers blindly believe[d] every word he said. They had some mental short circuit or emotional inability to contemplate that he might lie to them. Because once they entertained the mere IDEA that he could and would, and did, lie to them, the whole house of cards would come tumbling down.
The people who are leaving the Trump cult since his Big Lie about a stolen election has been questioned have told us that it was one little discrepancy, that let them to start thinking about others that just didn’t make sense in his false reality. We just have to be patient, while Trumpists discover that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are not the Devil Incarnate. They’re just Democrats, American patriots.
Democrats who intend to help as many Americans as they can avoid getting the Covid virus, get back on their feet with jobs and a healthier economy, and get their kids back in school. Joe Biden’s ego is much more secure than Donald Trump’s is, so he doesn’t have to be in the spotlight all the time.
Oh, and check out the expert press secretary he has!
Seems like a typical press secretary. She gets quite irritated when the usually compliant press don’t bend to her will. As evidenced today when they tried to do their job and ask about the people flooding the border since Jan 20.
Perhaps earlier Presidents should have had their words parsed carefully. Of course, most of them were capable of communicating above a third-grade level (are you complaining about accuracy in reporting?), so former President Trump would look bad by comparison.
It would be a big step forward if Trump supporters like Mr. Johnson could at least acknowledge that truth is very important to any kind of decision making process:
If my facts are right and yours wrong why try to find some point of compromise? Any thinking person knows the truth almost always lies somewhere in the middle in an argument: no one is 100% right 100% of the time. If Mr. Johnson could tell us the time that Trump acknowledged that maybe he was a little wrong and wanted to set the record straight?
Never happened. And it never happened because Trump has diagnosed mental incapacities that prevent him from doing so.
Which makes Trump a somewhat imperfect vessel in which to invest all your political hopes and aspirations.
In the spirit of Trump’s post presidency, I am setting up a Go Fund Me Page dedicated to providing him the psychological assistance he so desperately needs (with a 50% marketing fee for me).
And no President in history has ever held that office without ever having won an election in the literal sense of receiving the most votes.
Amazing to me is what’s noted already – his supporters don’t care. The truth is fake news.
Meanwhile, over at the RNC, just maybe somebody is wondering how they rid themselves of the beast. It seems that Trump is threatening to sue them to cease and desist using his likeness & encouraging people to donate to his PAC rather than the RNC.
The greatest grifter the world has ever seen continues his game!
https://www.vox.com/22321215/trump-rnc-cease-and-desist-fundraising-feud-purge
Trump, despite the fact that he lost his bid for re-election by a decisive margin, still manages to bring in a lot of money for the RNC.
What is truly interesting is to learn that the Lincoln Project was being run as a cash cow for those behind it. A group of right-wing grifters trying to take down another right-wing grifter.
Or at least one of them was a grifter.
What is the total for the current President? CNN totaled quite a few after the first town hall as I recall. President Trump will always be number one but a list of all the presidents and their totals would be nice for comparisons in the future. Twitter really did give Trump a leg up on everyone else with the sheer volume of material available to pour through.
If you look at Obama and GWB mostly false to false fact checking results you will see they were around 30%.
Trump ran at twice that rate. Anyone who cannot see that as an aberration is not trying…
Not only did I see it, I even mentioned how Trump dominated everyone else, by using Twitter to increase the sheer volume of statements. Thanks for the info on the previous two Presidents, who’d have thunk that they both were lying almost a third of the time?
Well, looks like these folks have gone back to 2007, and they are getting Joe kind of close to T****s running weekly average, so what is that ~13 years to equal 1 week?
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/list/?category=&ruling=false&speaker=joe-biden
Like watching a thoroughbred liar T**** against a turtle liar! And who thinks the turtle is going to win?
President Biden will likely have the lowest totals in decades primarily due to low volume and probably a shorter presidency. He is wise to let his handlers keep him clear of the press and the press doesn’t have much interest in checking on this president at this point. They will be grateful for any opportunity that they can get.
Actually, there are 1,461 days in four years – one Feb. 29. So daily average rounds up to 21 lies.
Trump is too big to fail. The GOP depends upon him. After all, the people wanted to believe — needed to believe — their emperor had a new set of fine clothes even when he hadn’t a stitch on. 74 million enablers is a heckuva crowd for anyone to sober up in.