Trump Lied More Than 30,000 Times During His Presidency. No Wonder We’re Exhausted.

Washington Post fact checkers have released their final tally of presidential BS.

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It’s the first weekend of Joe Biden’s presidency, which surely means a lot of things to many people, but to me, it means I don’t have to spend my weekend shift waiting to write about President Donald Trump’s latest, inevitable lie.

At Mother Jones, we’ve corrected countless Trump falsehoods over the past four years, from his bull about the stock market and hooey about global warming to disinformation about the legitimacy of the election and bunkum about the coronavirus pandemic. It was exhausting. And numbing.

The public’s apathy and despair towards Trump’s lies, researchers point out, were by design: The attacks mirrored a Russian propaganda technique known as the “firehose of falsehood,” which is exactly what it sounds like—relentless, rapid, bogus information. As Mother Jones‘ Mark Follman wrote in October, “Trump is using the autocrat’s playbook. Vladimir Putin’s, to be specific.”

Now the Washington Post‘s Fact Checker team has finished its final catalog of the extent of the former president’s efforts to mislead and misinform us. According to its tally, Trump made more than 30,000 “false or misleading” claims during his presidency. Half of those lies were told during his last year in office, according to the Post‘s database:

This astonishing jump in falsehoods is the story of Trump’s tumultuous reign. By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency—averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day.

What is especially striking is how the tsunami of untruths kept rising the longer he served as president and became increasingly unmoored from the truth.

Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in this 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 an additional 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later.

Here’s a chart of the exponential growth of Trump’s cumulative “untruths”:

Washington Post

Due to the incredible volume of falsehoods, the project was a massive undertaking. “It’s just a terrible time suck,” Glenn Kessler, the editor and chief writer of the Fact Checker team, told the Mother Jones Podcast in June. If Trump were to win a second term, Kessler said at the time, “The Post may have to hire a few more people for us to keep it up.” I’m all for hiring more journalists, but in this case, I’m glad some of my colleagues were spared this fate.

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That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

payment methods

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