2018 Was The Year Trump Accelerated The Lies
Not surprisingly, President Trump significantly accelerated the pace of his lies in 2018.
When it came to telling the truth, 2018 was a tough year for President Trump:
President Trump’s year of lies, false statements and misleading claims started with some morning tweets.
Over a couple of hours on 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 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.
Fewer than 3 in 10 Americans believe many of his most-common false statements, according to a Fact Checker poll conducted 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 with 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 U.S. 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 schoolchildren are taught about George Washington? That he never told a lie,” the historian 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 uttered 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 midsummer 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.
(…)
More than a quarter of Trump’s claims were made during campaign rallies. On Nov. 5, the day before the midterm elections, for instance, Trump held three rallies, yielding a total of 139 false or misleading claims. A review of every statement made by Trump at two of his earlier 2018 ralliesfound that he exaggerated or made up at least 70 percent of his assertions.
Almost as many false claims came during remarks at press events, and about 17 percent were the result of his itchy Twitter finger.
(…)
Sometimes, Trump simply attempts to create his own reality.
When leaders attending the U.N. General Assembly burst into laughter when Trump uttered a favorite false claim — that his administration had accomplished more in less than two years than “almost any administration in the history of our country” — the president was visibly startled and remarked that he “didn’t expect that reaction.” But then he later falsely insisted to reporters that the boast “was meant to get some laughter.”
In an October interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump emphatically denied he had imposed many tariffs. “I mean, other than some tariffs on steel — which is actually small, what do we have? . . . Where do we have tariffs? We don’t have tariffs anywhere,” he insisted. The newspaper responded by printing a list of $305 billion worth of tariffs on many types of U.S. imports.
Trump exaggerates when the facts are on his side.
He routinely touts a job-growth number that dates from his election, not when he took office, thus inflating it by 600,000 jobs. And although there’s no question Trump can draw supporters to his rallies by the thousands, he often claims pumped-up numbers that have no basis in fact. At a Tampa rally, he declared that “thousands of people” who could not get in were watching outside on a “tremendous movie screen.” Neither a crowd of that size nor the movie screen existed.
Given the fact that 2018 was an election year, it’s probably not surprising that Trump’s tendency to lie and mislead was seemingly so much higher than it had been in 2017. As the Washington Post fact checkers have noted previously, Trump’s lies seem to become most apparent during the largely unscripted, and always unhinged, speeches that he gives during the campaign-style rallies that he held while running for President, and which he has continued to hold even after taking office. The number of those rallies understandably increase in 2018 in the runup to the to midterm elections, with the President on the road pretty much every week from Labor Day through Election Day, and also holding such events at other times throughout the year. Additionally, while the statistics haven’t been published yet, it does seem as though the President relied on his Twitter feed, another forum where he repeatedly spread lies and misrepresentations, more and more as the year went on, especially as it became clear that the Mueller investigation and the investigation of his former lawyer Michael Cohen were closing in around him in ways that are likely to have a big impact in the year to come.
All of this comes on top of the report last week, that the President had told more than 7,500 lies during the first 700 days of his Presidency. That’s an average of more than ten lies a day, and it puts the President on a course that would put him at more than 14,000 lies during his first term in office and more than 28,000 should he serve a second term. Even that astounding calculation, though, doesn’t take into account the possibility, if not the likelihood that lying will become even more common for this President in the coming year. Given the fact that 2019 is likely to see increasing pressure on the White House from the Mueller investigation, the Cohen investigation, the investigation of the Trump Foundation by the New York Attorney General’s Office, and the investigations likely to be undertaken by the Democratic-controlled Congress, we can safely assume that Trump will lash out and that this lashing out will become less and less grounded in reality. Add to this the fact that we’ll be entering the 2020 campaign season, and the prospect for the President to lie is just going to increase. In that respect, I wouldn’t be surprised if, a year from now, we find that the President’s lies have become even more prevalent.
Better head for high ground, we are about to be inundated by a tsunami of lies.
Trump is a bred-in-the-bone liar. He can’t not lie. Back in The Art of the Deal, he (Tony Schwartz, actually) spoke of how useful he found “truthful hyperbole” in getting what he wanted. That was 30+ years ago.
My favorite bit is that the rise in the stock markets will cover the deficit from the tax cuts or maybe that the NAFTA replacement will pay for the wall or ….
Since these stories don’t shake the loyalty of a single supporter, there is no reason to think they’ll stop. I recommend ignoring them. Report concrete actions not his stories. And please, please don’t report his mood; he’s angry, very angry all the time.
We’ve seen a serious decline in defenses of Trump by the Trump Chumps, partly because of this. It’s harder to defend a person when you can’t use their own words because they’re always obviously lying.
I have been cursed to know prolific liars like this in my personal life. You literally have to disbelieve everything no matter what. Some things may turn out to be true and you’ll think, “Maybe it’s unfair to just disbelieve everything.”
No.
When they tell the truth, it just means they forgot to lie. Believe nothing.
OT and Brexit related, but I couldn’t resist this.
It looks like the “U.K. firm” which Grayling-the-idiot is providing loads of money to in order to act as freight back-up in a no-deal Brexit case has no ships, no experience, is undercapitalised, and…..copied their legal boilerplate from a pizza delivery place. Without rewriting it.
I kid you not.
@James Pearce: I was married to a pathological liar. I became convinced that on the few occasions she told the truth it was by accident.
Obama “I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage.”
Not a lie, false statement or misleading claim.
So in 2018 the mainstream Press become more pedantic and Factchecks opinion.
@Paul L.: What in this analysis âfact-checks opinionâ?
@grumpy realist: Was that the same tiny company that got the contract from the US government to rebuild Puerto Ricoâs power grid?
OT but revealing:
@Paul L.: I changed my mind on that same subject. Is that okay?
@gVOR08: …the British equivalent thereof. It also looks like two of the directors had their penultimate company go bankrupt. Yes, exactly the sorts of people you want running an essential part of the country’s channels of commerce. (Dr. North, of Eureferendum, has been running analyses on the sort of freight-replacement necessary if more non-tariff barriers are implemented and is aghast at the stupidity of the U.K. government.)
I think the U.K. is going to learn very very painfully that a) logistics are important, b) if you have red lines the other party may have red lines they-will-not-cross as well, c) bluffing can’t create an economy out of nowhere, and d) the U.K. really isn’t as important to the rest of the world as it thinks it is. Following the commentary in the Torygraph it’s amazing how much of the mentality of the average Torygraph reader is that of acute pissed-off-ness that the rest of the world (and mainly the EU) won’t docilely come to heel and do whatever the U.K. wants. (What they say about Ireland is even more unprintable. To read their comments, one gets the impression the only role the little Englanders have for the Irish is for the latter to tug their forelocks and dig potatoes for their English betters.)
(It is possible that most of the commentators are Russian-based trolls hankering to make mischief, but considering the idiocies uttered by certain British politicians in broad daylight in front of a TV camera, I’m afraid that the arrogance is all-too-real.)
@Paul L.: I was going to ask if you’ve ever changed your mind on some subject for any reason. Then I realized that the question was just stupid as it relates to you.
@grumpy realist: But if the UK is frozen out of global trade, where will all the Lucas refrigeration systems that produce lukewarm beer for taverns and pubs come from?
@Just nutha ignint cracker: If Paul’s trying for some kind of equivalency between Obama’s ‘lies’, and Trump’s, it’s a stupid tactic, since Trump told more lies this week than Obama told in the past twelve years. He’d be better off trying to do what that other Trump chump tried to do a few months ago, and come up with some excuse as to why it’s okay for Trump to lie all the time.
@Kylopod:
Palin vs PolitiFact on tax-cut expirations
Factchecking
Do seven children per day die from guns?
https://www.pagunblog.com/2016/12/28/politifact-openly-aids-gun-control-groups-narrative/
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Changed his mind equals lied and mislead people about his views to win election/reelection.
So in this situation.
Hilary Clinton says she supports the 2nd amendment and not Gun registration and confiscation in 2016 election.
When she signs a law banning provate ownership pof firearms, you would defend her with “SHE JUST CHANGED HER MIND!!!1”
@Paul L.: I asked you a very simple question: “What in this analysis ‘fact-checks opinion’?” You respond by citing a blog post from nearly 10 years ago quarreling with one single Politifact rating challenging a claim by Sarah Palin.
Again, I ask: Give me one example–just one!–where the above analysis of Trump’s lies in 2018 confuses opinion with fact.
Failure to answer this will be an implicit admission that you lose the argument.
@Paul L.: Although it has nothing to do with this thread, I would agree that counting 18- and 19-year-olds as children in a statistic is somewhat misleading.
That said, that age group can’t buy alcohol or rent a car. On the other hand, people less than 18 have been tried as an adult. And not every state defines the age of majority as 18. Not everything is black-and-white, you see, although I understand that certain minds want it to work that way.
And approaching it from a standpoint other than legality, I’ve never heard somebody comment at somebody’s 18th birthday party, “now you’re an adult.” Heck, I was two or three inches shorter at 18 than I am now, and I certainly didn’t mature until some 20 years after that (if ever).
@Kylopod:
No evidence FBI officials’ texts deliberately erased, as Donald Trump said
So if there is no Body and Dash Cam video of police killing an innocent unarmed man due to it being erased by mistake, I should believe the police that the killing was justified .
Saying otherwise means I should be arrested for Defamation, Perjury and Obstruction because I am assaulting and undermining the Rule of Law and the brave people of Law Enforcement who should never be doubted or questioned.
@Paul L.: If you have a point to make, you might try making it directly and without sarcasm. FWIW, and speaking only for myself, I can’t understand what you are trying to say. Are your comments meant as replies to the people challenging you? Or are they just tangents?
@Paul L.:
Your position amounts to, “I’ll believe what I want to believe, whether or not there are any facts.”
That’s not a position rational people can discuss with you because it’s the mind-set of a brainwashed cult member. This makes you effectively a null set, a parenthesis containing no data. All you can do is repeat whatever cult leader fed you, which makes you nothing, valueless in a discussion of the real world with non-culties.
@Michael Reynolds:
Is that Religion? You got to have Faith on something.
Like String Physics, Gender is a spectrum and 10,000 temperature sensors can accurately and precisely map the entire Earth’s atmosphere.
@MarkedMan:
I gave one example of a Trump lie in 2018 that confused opinion with fact.
BTW, I believed the FBI is a corrupt organization when they fought against recording their interviews, assaulted people taking pictures of their buildings from public areas and manufactured evidence to convict Ted Stevens.
@MarkedMan:
Trumpies don’t have beliefs other than love of Trump. Ask Paul if he believes this. . .
. . . is true. He’ll have no choice but to start spinning lies and obfuscations. They are not capable of formulating actual strategies or long-term policies or maintaining any consistency or integrity. They fear brown people, hate black people and gays, and are furious that the coastal elites think they’re morons. That’s all they’ve got. There’s a reason Trump said. . .
@Michael Reynolds:
I believe the Trump wall statement more than Obama’s and Clinton’s statements of support for traditional marriage and people’s 1st and 2nd amendment rights.
Or progressive judges claiming DACA is a law not just a DHS policy memo.
@Paul L.:
Thanks for proving my point.
DJIA dropped another 660 points today, to October 2017 levels.
@MarkedMan: I was also puzzled by Paul’s reply, until I did a little Google search and found what I think he was alluding to. In Jan. 2016, the family of a young man who had been shot down by police filed a lawsuit alleging that police had seized video footage of the incident and deleted it.
The incident was so obscure and little-reported that it is not even mentioned on Wikipedia. Indeed, I didn’t find more than about 200 hits for it on Google, mostly from local papers, and nearly all of it from around the time the incident occurred. I can’t even find any info about the outcome of the case.
@Paul L.:
No, you didn’t. You linked to a Politifact article noting that a claim Trump stated as fact, not opinion (Trump’s own words: “…the fact that 19,000 demanded Text messages…were purposely & illegally deleted”) was made up out of whole cloth and had no evidence to support it. Then your only response was to allude to some obscure and totally unrelated 3-year-old lawsuit alleging a police coverup, but without explaining how that has any bearing on the Trump claim. When Politifact points out that Trump offered no evidence to support his assertion that the FBI purposely deleted thousands of texts, it’s not because coverups by law enforcement never happen. It’s because Trump offered no evidence to support his assertion. What in God’s name is the point you’re trying to make?
@Teve: If you want to get a slice of just how totally divorced Trump is from reality, take a look at his second-to-latest tweet:
“The RNC has a great Chairwoman in Ronna McDaniel and the @GOP has never been stronger. We achieved historic wins with her help last year! #MAGA”
The responses, as you can imagine, are priceless.
@Kylopod:
đ đ đ
The situation of Body and Dash Cam video of police killing an innocent unarmed man due to it “being erased by mistake” was hypothetical .
I was thinking of the murder of Andrew Finch.
But I see your point that Law Enforcement coverups are so rare that one obscure lawsuit is the only example you could find.
@Paul L.: I’m still waiting for you to provide evidence to support Trump’s claim that the FBI purposely deleted 19,000 text messages. Changing the subject isn’t going to work.
@Franklin:..@Paul L.: I changed my mind on that same subject. Is that okay?
If a change of mind on conviction is ok with these guys…
Since the far right lives in a media bubble filled with nonsense and declares everything else âfake newsâ (appropriating the term used to describe the Russian propaganda in 2016), can we use that to our advantage?
How hard and how expensive would it be to create an entire fake news organization, reminding them to vote at fake polling places, telling them that they won, explaining that America is awesomely successful, and that the things from the NYTimes mentioning President Warren are fake news? The New York Times was bought by The Onion, and is now just long form sarcasm. Donât worry about it. Can you believe some libtards believe it?
Theyâre living in their own world now (fun game, read Fox News homepage, then try to guess what WaPo has… you might hit 50%), so why not just separate it? Tell them MI-5 r MS-13 or something is running rampant in any desireabe states, and the smart move is to sel their house now, before their property values plummet, and move to Real America. I bet we could even get them to build a wall to keep themselves in, so long as we say Mexico is paying for it.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Are you another old sports car guy? I heard all the Lucas jokes back in the early 70s when I owned a 66 MG B. Even the Lucas Chairmanâs friends called him the Prince of Darkness. If Britannia rules the waves, why canât their cars negotiate a puddle?
In fairness, I once had a hood latch failure at speed that wrapped the aluminum hood around the windshield frame over my head. That was a moment. During the pre FedEx several weeks it took to get a new hood I drove it every day in thunderstorm season and never had the first sputter.
@Paul L.: Must have stepped on someone’s toes pretty hard there. Well, I do what I can.
ETA: BTW, I really do like the Scarlet Pimpernel cosplay thing. Unique.
Maybe itâs time for me to get a job at Twitter. Would anyone notice if Trumpâs tweets radically changed policy on a whim if they ended with MAGA?
âCowardly Dems want to poison West Virginia with coal waste, and replace everyone with illegals. Sad. Not going to work. We need strong CONSERVATIVE EPA to protect Real America. Open coal mines in Chuck and Nancyâs towns, not ours. MAGA.â
@Kylopod:
That’s why it’s so hard for me to keep track of what type of claim he’s trying to make. He’s very confusing–or confused, it’s hard to tell. Maybe both.
@gVOR08: Had one of the Lancia Betas produced after the company was bought by Fiat, but otherwise, no, old sports cars were always outside of my cultural millieu and economic range. I always wanted one though, and assembled model MGs and Jaguars when I was a kid. Didn’t have the money to paint them ever, so I settled for using the decals included with the kits for dressing up the cars.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
When I was a kid I wanted the single sexiest car ever built: the Jaguar XKE. But I was nine, so that was unlikely to work out. But since then I’ve never really liked sports cars, possibly because I’m 6’2″ and aside from Corvettes sports cars aren’t built for large people. I actually have the car I want, a Merc Cabriolet. I may trade it in next year but I might just get another. I can’t imagine WTF I’d do with a Lambo or a Vayron. Not exactly practical.
@Gustopher:
I like this a lot. A right-wing Truman Show.
@Michael Reynolds: even when I was a Porsche Guy the one time I saw a white, restored XKE up-close-and-personal, I was amazed.
@Michael Reynolds: I am a man of simpler tastes. When I was youngster, I wanted a Jaguar XJ6, just like Edward Woodwardâs character on âThe Equalizerâ. Also, I think my goal was to be a crotchety old man who has trouble with interpersonal relationships who solves other peopleâs problems to avoid his own (goal status: mostly achieved, except for the helping other people bit, and only being 48).
Now, I just want a cute, red, Honda Civic. Alas, at 6â6â, this (shockingly modest) goal will not happen.
@Michael Reynolds: Nice car alright. Before my discs started shrinking, I was 6’3″. Last year, I considered buying a Miata, but I had to give up on the idea because my L-5 disc is shrinking faster than the rest (I’m 6’1 now and my right shoulder is about an inch and a half lower than my left when I look in the mirror) so, I couldn’t duck my head under the roof line with the top up. (Have the same problem in my friend’s new Honda.) Settled on a Chevy Spark because I really liked the Daewoo Matiz in Korea. Nice ride, easy on the wallet, makes drivers of surburban assault vehicles angry when they see me cruising at 2200 rpm at 70 mph on the freeway with plenty of ability to accelerate if I need to.
Not a Merc Cab for sure, but meets my needs. And a nice high roof line so I don’t hurt my neck getting in and out.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I had a ’67 MG-B and after a couple of years I had to be careful of running through any large puddles since it took an hour or two of sitting by the roadside to dry something out. That wasn’t it’s most winning characteristic. It had a device behind the dash that made noises when you flipped a switch labeled ‘heat/defrost’. Not a fan. Definitely nothing that moved air.
Put 120K miles on it and still smile when I think of it. Maybe because I was 24yrs old?
@Kylopod:
So you agree with Politifalse that.
That 9,000 demanded Text messages between Peter Strzok and his FBI lover, Lisa Page, were
never deleted.
It is not illegal to delete those Text messages.
@Paul L.:
Did you even read the article you linked to? It didn’t say the messages in question (19,000, not 9,000, by the way) weren’t deleted. It points out there’s no evidence their deletion was a deliberate human act rather than a result of technical glitches. Furthermore, Trump suggested the messages were irretrievably gone when in fact they were retrieved and did not show anything proving the investigation was a “hoax” as he claimed.
You refer to the site as “Politifalse” and yet you’ve completely failed, after repeated requests, to provide one iota of evidence that what it stated here was false. All you do is dodge and deflect. And remember, this was the very article you yourself chose that was supposed to demonstrate Politifact confusing opinion with fact–and yet it had Trump himself explicitly describing his claim as a “fact,” not simply a personal opinion or speculation.
If that’s the best you could do, you’ve really got nothing.
@Kylopod:
“Justice Departmentâs internal watchdog suggests the roughly 19,000 messages slipped through the cracks due to technical glitches with the FBIâs data-collection tool on Samsung devices”
suggests not proves.
Let us overlook the text messages on the iPhones because the special counsel said so.
@Paul L.: Text messages don’t just vanish. There are logs of the messages being sent received and routed. There are a variety of ways a text message would still exist even after being deleted on the receiving phone.
Your scenario is completely irrelevant.
In your scenario the video was deleted by mistake. We know it was deleted by mistake because there was evidence of said deletion and someone declaring it a mistake.
Meanwhile the texts were found and investigated. Turns out the texts were completely irrelevant so they were tossed.