It’s Been 50 Days of President Trump. How Many Lies Has He Told?

Short Answer: Hundreds

Donald Trump has been president for 50 days now. We’re a bit more than three percent through his term, assuming he lasts all four years and doesn’t have a second term.

The Washington Post has been tracking Trump’s statements, comments, and remarks, and finds the President of the United States lies or makes false or misleading claims on average more than four times a day.

“In the 50 days Trump has been in office, we’ve counted 219 false or misleading claims,” the Post reports in this interactive article. “The most frequent topic of these claims is jobs, which came up 37 times. Other frequent topics are immigration (36 claims) and foreign policy (26 claims).”

There is only one day Trump did not lie or mislead, March 1. On that day, he made no public statements.

The Post has listed each false remark, how many times and when he repeated it – he does that a lot – and debunked each claim. 

For example, on March 6, Trump said: “It’s such spirit that we haven’t seen in the country in a long time. Jobs are pouring back here. You saw what happened with Exxon, where they just announced a massive job program.”

In reality, as the Post notes, “Trump again takes credit for a project long in the works before he became president. ExxonMobil has been planning this since 2013.” In fact, there are many instances of Trump taking credit for planned hiring that was publicly announced well before the election. Sadly, the CEO’s of these companies, looking to curry favor with the administration, often allow the lie to stand.

Several days earlier, Trump tweeted: “Buy American & hire American are the principals at the core of my agenda, which is: JOBS, JOBS, JOBS!” (Note the spelling error, another frequent feature of Trump.)

Trump’s “agenda” may be “hire American,” but in his own businesses that isn’t the case.

“Trump has a long history of outsourcing a variety of his own products,” the paper says. “The Fact Checker has counted a total of 12 countries where Trump products were manufactured (China, the Netherlands, Mexico, India, Turkey, Slovenia, Honduras, Germany, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam and South Korea).” And that doesn’t include all the foreign visa workers Trump hotels and resorts hire, often at much lower wages.

Here’s a 2016 New York Times report about Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, where he now spends most weekends:

Since 2010, nearly 300 United States residents have applied or been referred for jobs as waiters, waitresses, cooks and housekeepers there. But according to federal records, only 17 have been hired.

In all but a handful of cases, Mar-a-Lago sought to fill the jobs with hundreds of foreign guest workers from Romania and other countries.

On March 7, Trump tweeted, “It is so pathetic that the Dems have still not approved my full Cabinet.”

Was that true?

“The Senate Democrats did hold up Trump’s Cabinet picks at one time,” the Post confirms. “But as of Trump’s tweet, there were two empty slots; the administration had not sent the rest of the paperwork for one and had not sent a nominee to fill the other slot.”

How can he blame Democrats when he hasn’t even done his job?

Well, we all know the answer to that.

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Photo by duncan c via Flickr and a CC license