The Washington Post
www.washingtonpost.com email@washingtonpost.com 08 nov 2024 By Glenn Kessler
Of my 14 years as The Washington Post Fact Checker, nine have
been devoted to dissecting and debunking claims made by Donald
Trump. Indeed, no person has been fact-checked more often than Trump....
I first covered Trump as a business reporter in the 1980s, so I was very familiar with his long history of exaggeration and bravado when he burst onto the political stage in 2015.
“Businessman Donald Trump is a fact checker’s dream … and
nightmare,” I wrote in the fact check of his 2015 announcement
speech that he would seek the presidency.
Now he’s convincingly won a second term in the electoral college
and is even on track for the first time to win the popular vote.
After his first two elections, I wrote essays that, in retrospect,
misjudged the Trump phenomenon.
With humility, I looked back at those essays and wrote a new one.
**********************
Trump’s first term: 30,573 false or misleading claims
Shortly after Trump was elected in 2016, we started a project to document every false or misleading claim he made in the first 100 days. We counted 492 untruths. In response to reader
requests, we decided to keep it going — first for an entire year, and then for his whole presidency.
The longer Trump was president, the more time-consuming the project became. Trump averaged about
06 claims a day in his first year as president,
16 claims day in his second year,
22 claims day in his third year — and
39 claims a day in his final year.
Put another way, it took him
27 months to reach 10,000 claims and another
14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the
30,000 mark less than five months later.
We were gratified when the project was nominated in 2020 by
the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University for inclusion on a list of the Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade.
Still, it was draining for our small staff —and a second Trump term probably calls for a new approach.
During the campaign, Trump repeated many of the claims
we had previously documented.
