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.

Alex Wong/Getty

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

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.

WE'LL BE BLUNT:

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate