Matthew Chattle/Rex Shutterstock via ZUMA
I think we all understand that nobody cares about Donald Trump’s relentless lying. We’ve certainly been hit over the head with it enough times. Still, the sheer volume is pretty staggering. Here’s the Washington Post’s roundup of Trump’s first hundred days:
488: The number of false or misleading claims made by the president. That’s an average of 4.9 claims a day.
10: Number of days without a single false claim. (On six of those days, the president golfed at a Trump property.)
4: Number of days with 20 or more false claims. (Feb. 16, Feb. 28, March 20 and April 21.) He made 19 false claims on April 29, his 100th day, though we did not include his interview with “Face the Nation,” since that aired April 30.
Five lies per day! And not just any lies. Trump’s lies are so much more brazen than that. He’s the first president to have hacked the modern media so thoroughly. He realizes he can literally say anything he wants and it doesn’t matter if the Washington Post or anybody else calls him out later. The only thing that matters is that he said it and it got on TV.
Karl Rove glimpsed this new reality back in the aughts, but was too conventional a politician to take it to its logical conclusion. Trump is the modern-day Galileo who finally put it all together.
