Fact Checking Donald J. Trump…..’His relentless dishonesty’

Donald ‘LIES like a Rug’……

CNN’s….Analysis by Daniel Dale

Ten years ago this month, in my old job as Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star, I started what I believed would be a quick little side project: fact-checking underdog presidential candidate Donald Trump, who was telling a remarkable number of lies but was rarely being corrected. Like a lot of people, I thought Trump would lose the 2016 election.

I was very wrong. And Trump continued to be very wrong, about a dizzying variety of subjects, for the next decade.

His relentless dishonesty has become a central feature of US and world politics. Voters and members of Congress, allies and adversaries, CEOs and investors alike have had to try to figure out how to read a man whose words are so frequently not true.

How frequently? Two months before Election Day in 2020, I had to abandon my four-year-old project of fact-checking each and every Trump statement. He was telling so many campaign lies that I’d become physically unable to look into all of them while living something loosely resembling a healthy life. By then, I’d recorded more than 8,500 false claims since September 2016….

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There is no Washington liar like Trump

Joe Biden sometimes lied, JD Vance sometimes lies, Republicans and Democrats in Congress sometimes lie, Cabinet secretaries notably including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sometimes lie; Washington is not the nation’s capital of straight shooting. But it’s abundantly clear that there is no public official in Washington who lies like Trump – not as constantly, not as obviously, not about as many topics. I’ve heard people dismiss Trump’s mendacity with a shrugging “they all lie,” but we are witnessing a rare, very possibly once-in-a-lifetime political liar.

The bigger the crisis, the more Trump lies

Trump’s most concerted lying sprees have come in response to political difficulties: the 2018 midterms in which his party was flailing, the 2019 Ukraine scandal that led to his first impeachment, the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic that was harming his political prospects and the 2020 election he lost. When Trump gets in trouble, he ramps up the dishonesty – even in the cases where dishonesty created some of the trouble in the first place….

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