Report : Trump Claims 15 False Average A Day In 2018

Donald Trump made nearly three times as many false or misleading claims in 2018 than during his first year as president 

 The year of lies, misrepresentations and misleading allegations by President Donald Trump began with a series of morning tweets.

In the space of a few hours on January 2, Trump misrepresented three of his favorite targets: Iran, the New York Times and Hillary Clinton. He also praised the "best year ever" of commercial aviation, although there have been no commercial jet accidents in the United States since 2009 and that, anyway, the president does not have much to do with commercial aviation safety.

The tweet shootout marked the beginning of a year of unprecedented deception during which Trump became increasingly immune to the truth. When 2018 began, the president had made 1,989 false and misleading statements, according to the Washington Post's Fact Checker database, which tracks all the suspect's statements made by the president. By the end of the year, Trump had accumulated more than 7,600 lies during his presidency, averaging more than 15 erroneous claims per day in 2018, almost triple the rate of the previous year.

Although Trump's non-factual statements proliferate, it is becoming increasingly clear that his approach is failing.

According to a poll by Fact Checker earlier this month, fewer than three in ten Americans believe that many of their most common misrepresentations are false. Only among a group of powerful Trump approvers - about 1 in 6 adults in the poll - the major majorities have accepted many, but not all, truths as true.

Similarly, a November Quinnipiac survey found that 58% of voters said Trump was not honest, compared to 36% of voters who said he was honest. The same poll found that 50% of respondents said it was "less honest" than most previous presidents, setting a record for most voters in the quinnipia polls.

"When have we ever seen a president so indifferent to the distinction between truth and falsehood, or so eager to blur this distinction?" Presidential historian Michael R. Beschloss spoke of Trump in 2018.

Beschloss noted that the constitution set very few guidelines in this regard, as it was expected that the first president would be George Washington and that he would set the tone for the position. "What do we teach schoolchildren about George Washington?" He never lied, "he said. "It's the fundamental expectation of a president by the Americans."

Trump started 2018 at a similar pace to last year. Until May, he averaged an average of between 200 and 250 false claims. But its rate suddenly exploded in June, when it exceeded 500 lies, while it seemed to go into campaign mode. It made nearly 500 more in July and August, nearly 600 in September, more than 1,200 in October and nearly 900 in November. In December, Trump came back in the middle of the 200s.

Trump's acceleration in the middle of the summer occurred when the White House stopped holding news briefs and the main voice in the administration was Trump, who repeatedly met with reporters. , organized events, organized rallies and tweeted constantly.

Trump is among the most talkative of recent presidents, according to Martha Kumar, professor emeritus at Towson University, who follows every presidential interaction with the media, dating back to Ronald Reagan. Until December 20, Trump held 323 brief Q & A sessions with reporters just after Bill Clinton's first 23 months, and granted 196 interviews, second to Barack Obama.

More than a quarter of Trump's claims came during campaign rallies. On November 5, the day before the mid-term elections, for example, Trump held three rallies, generating a total of 139 false or misleading statements. A review of each statement made by Trump at two of his previous gatherings in 2018 revealed that he exaggerated or constituted at least 70% of his assertions.

Almost as many misrepresentations were made during speeches at press events, and about 17% were the result of the president's irritating finger on Twitter.

The president misled Americans about problems of all sizes. He told a series of lies about the payments of his now-convicted lawyer, saying that Trump is allowed to silence women alleging business with him. He regularly exaggerates his achievements, for example by claiming to have passed the largest tax reduction ever made, presided over the best economy

 The president also simply invents false facts. He repeatedly said that US Steel was building six to eight new steel mills, but that's not true. He said that as president, Barack Obama had granted citizenship to 2,500 Iranians during negotiations on a nuclear deal, but that is not true. Trump has repeatedly stated that the man born in Uzbekistan, accused in 2017 of killing eight people in New York with a van, brought two dozen parents to the United States by "chain migration". The real number is zero.

In one of his most absurd statements of 2018, Trump called the Palm Beach Post "fake news" for blaming it for traffic jams across the country - while an article on the impact of the low price Gasoline driving habits never mentioned his name.

Sometimes Trump simply tries to create his own reality.

When the leaders at the UN General Assembly burst out laughing when Trump made a favorite false statement - his administration had accomplished in less than two years that "almost any administration in the history of our country" - the President was visibly surprised and noticed he "did not expect this reaction". But later, he falsely insisted that the journalists boast "was meant to make people laugh."

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in October, Trump insists he has imposed many tariffs. "I mean, apart from some tariffs on steel - which is actually small, what do we have? ... Where do we have tariffs? We have no tariffs anywhere." he insisted. The paper responded by printing a $ 305 billion tariff list on many types of US imports.

Trump exaggerates when the facts are on his side.

He regularly boasts a job growth figure that dates back to his election, not when he took office, which boosted him by 600,000 jobs. And while there is no doubt that Trump can attract followers to his thousands gatherings, he often claims that inflated figures have no real basis. At a rally in Tampa, he said that "thousands of people" who could not come in were watching out on a "terrific movie screen". Neither a crowd of this size nor the cinema screen existed.