Trump doles out lies at record-setting pace By: Editorial Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Tuesday, Apr. 30, 2019

Opinion

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This article was published 29/04/2019 (2069 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the world of sports, there are some records that are considered unassailable: Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hit streak, Wayne Gretzky’s 2,857 career points total, Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 points in a single game, Teemu Selanne’s 76-goal rookie season, Cal Ripken Jr.’s 2,632-consecutive-game iron-man streak.

Politics watchers aren’t as statisically obsessed as sports fans, but they all took note this week when a high-profile player in the most major-league of all elected offices shattered a barrier that had previously not even been something people felt the need to keep track of.

According to the Washington Post, U.S. President Donald Trump this week eclipsed 10,000 “false or misleading statements” during his tenure in the White House. Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler said Mr. Trump achieved the milestone by making an average of 23 bogus claims per day during the past seven months.

The pace with which these false or misleading statements — for brevity’s sake, let’s just call them lies — have been doled out has accelerated steadily throughout the Trump presidency; it took 601 days to reach the 5,000-lie mark (roughly eight per day) and just 227 more days to double up to 10,000. In order to hit the total of 10,111 recorded by last Saturday, Mr. Trump had to tell 171 fibs in the three days leading into the weekend.

The odd thing about POTUS’s prevaricational output is that it can’t really be considered any kind of a record. There literally is no comparison. Simply put, there has not been another presidency in which anyone felt it necessary to keep statistical track of bald-faced deviations from the truth.

Politicians are, by their nature, inclined to spin, massage, stretch and manipulate the truth to suit their messages and agendas. But when Americans elected Mr. Trump in 2016, they installed as their commander-in-chief an individual whose entire public life has been defined by an apparent willingness to do whatever it takes to advance his interests and expand his fortune, and a mocking disdain for the vast majority of the population who are tethered to moral and ethical principles.

Simply put, there has not been another presidency in which anyone felt it necessary to keep statistical track of bald-faced deviations from the truth.

That Mr. Trump has lied 10,000 times since taking the oath of office should come as no surprise; he is simply being true to his nature. President Trump is exactly what businessman Trump was. What is more curious about his ascension beyond the 10,000-lie plateau is the manner in which so many Americans — from red-cap-clad grassroots voters, to evangelical Christian apologists, to white-supremacist supporters, to oath-sworn elected Republicans — have been willing to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to Mr. Trump’s daily doses of deception because having a pathological liar-in-chief in office serves their broader purposes in ways that makes the moral compromise palatable.

And as the now Democrat-controlled House of Representatives pursues the numerous avenues of investigation laid out in the Mueller report, prompting various Trump administration officials to declare they’ll defy orders to testify before House committees and inspiring members of the Trump family to file lawsuits against banks to prevent them from producing subpoena-ordered financial records, the pace at which the president produces false, misleading and inflammatory statements, speeches and tweets is sure to increase even more.

With a year and a half to go before the 2020 presidential election, 20,000 seems completely within reach. If political historians kept track of such things the way sports statisticians do, Mr. Trump would already be an all-time record holder.