Donald Trump Has Already Told 2,000 Lies, According To The ‘Washington Post’
Donald Trump is fond of saying that his administration has accomplished more in its first year than any previous administration in history. Critics of the president have been quick to take issue with his claim. A new article in the Washington Post, however, does point to one achievement that Trump can tout that no other American president has been able to match. They say he has told 2,000 lies in less than one year since his inauguration on January 20, 2017.
The Washington Post began a project in early 2017 to chronicle a running list of all of Donald Trump’s lies. Initially, the plan had been to only cover the first hundred days, but when they tabulated so many during that period that the average turned out to be 4.9 lies a day, they decided they needed to continue. The paper claims that in the time since, Trump’s rate of daily lying has actually increased to 5.6 lies a day.
The Post cited three lies specifically, from a meeting this past Tuesday. One of these prevarications, they say, is the one that lifted Trump above the 2,000 lie barrier.
The first was that the border wall Trump has been promising since he was on the campaign trail will be finished in less than a year and for a lot less money than most people have claimed. According to an article in Esquire, most experts consulted on the job say that the cost will likely exceed $25 billion and take at least four years, if not longer.
The second is a lie the Washington Post says the president has repeated many times now, about the diversity immigration lottery. Trump claimed that the lottery allows other countries to send the “worst of the worst” and the United States has no choice but to accept those people into the country. In actuality, the immigration lottery works nothing like that. Applicants have to have at least a high school diploma and need to be proficient in specialized fields of work that are beneficial to the United States before they are even allowed to enter the lottery. Once an applicant has been selected, they still have to go through an extensive background check before they are allowed access to the United States.
Thirdly, Trump claimed, as he has before, that illegal drugs are pouring over the porous border from Mexico and the wall will put a stop to it. According to Esquire, 75 percent of illegal drugs are brought into the country through legal ports and commercial border crossings. The majority of the rest are brought in through undergrounds tunnels. The upshot is that a border wall will have little to no effect toward stemming the illegal drug trade.
The Washington Post continues by saying that President Trump has begun repeating his lies on a rather large scale. They have chronicled 70 different lies that he has told on at least two occasions. The two champion lies, they say, are that the Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare) is dying and that he is responsible for corporations adding jobs or making significant investments, when in fact these jobs and investments were announced before Trump became president. The Post claims that he has told each lie a whopping 61 times. They say these narrowly beat out Trump’s statement that America is the most heavily taxed country in the world. In fact, according to an article in the Independent, the United States doesn’t even make the top 10.
Naturally, pundits on Twitter have had a field day with the news.
Trump is on pace to tell 2000 lies his first year in office, per @washingtonpost.
2000!
The word of the President is everything and shouldn’t be thrown around without care.
2018 needs to be the year integrity is brought back to the WH and presidency. #TheResistance
— Demitri Dawson (@DemitriDawson) January 2, 2018
According to an article in the Independent, Jimmy Kimmel has even weighed in on Trump’s achievement on a recent program, wishing his audience a “Happy Lie2K.” You can watch a video of the segment below.
