Reuters
President Donald Trump, according to one well-publicized tally[1], has told 10,000 whoppers during this presidency.
His falsehoods include such incredible claims such as accurately stating the number of new jobs since the election. Or Trump saying he signed executive orders that he did, in fact, sign. Or claiming that Sen. Bernie Sanders, who wants corporate taxes to increase, worker wages to rise, and stock buybacks to end, wants 401(k) values to “dissipate.”
If those don’t sound so fraudulent, that’s because they’re not. The Washington Post’s count of what it calls “false and misleading statements,” and what other media outlets quickly short-handed to “lies”[2] by Trump, is itself inflated.
Sensing that the fact checkers are a bit too quick on the draw, I decided to review a series of contentions made by Glenn Kessler and the fact-checking team at the Washington Post. Rather than review all 10,000, I focused on the most recent 50 claims in both “economy” and “jobs,” mostly because I’m confident in the subject matter, and the data is well at hand. I found 27 out of 100 Trump comments to be defensible if not unimpeachably accurate.
Sometimes Kessler seems to be assuming words Trump said that the president did not. Other times he seems to demand a level of surrounding context that most would not insist from any other politician.
Kessler, to his credit, responded to a number of questions about his rankings.
“Many of the economic comments you have highlighted would be in the Two Pinocchio range [on its 1-4 scale], in which important context is missing or factual information is exaggerated (i.e., lowest unemployment rate in history, when the data only goes back 30 years, or describing the low as current when it took place a while ago),” he said in an email. “As you well know, ‘literally true’ comments can be misleading without the proper context, especially in the economic sphere.”
Kessler also said the newspaper has only used the word “lie” once — about Trump’s comments on Stormy Daniels hush money[3] — and tries to distance its assessments from that word. “We are always careful to say this is a list of false or misleading statements, but I obviously can’t control how other people write about our work,” he said.
I also asked Kessler about his criticizing Trump for not including context, but not providing context in his criticism, particularly when such surrounding information would be helpful toward the president.
For example, I pointed out that, while the U.S. is not the fastest growing economy in the world, as Trump has stated, it is nonetheless the fastest in the developed world, which the Post did not point out. “Your point about growth in the developed world is...