Trump’s Week of Misrepresentations, Exaggerations and Falsehoods

[Libertine]

Donald Trump’s Week of Misrepresentations, Exaggerations and Half-Truths


Trump told one lie every 3.25 minutes.

Trump averaged one falsehood every three minutes and 15 seconds over nearly five hours of remarks.

POLITICO fact-checked both candidates for a week. This is what we found.

As August ended, a new Donald Trump emerged. Coached by his third campaign management team, he stayed on message, read from a teleprompter and focused on policy. It lasted about a month.

After he lied on Sept. 16 that he was not the person responsible for the birtherism campaign to delegitimize Barack Obama’s presidency, POLITICO chose to spend a week fact-checking Trump. We fact-checked Hillary Clinton over the same time.

We subjected every statement made by both the Republican and Democratic candidates — in speeches, in interviews and on Twitter — to our magazine’s rigorous fact-checking process. The conclusion is inescapable: Trump’s mishandling of facts and propensity for exaggeration so greatly exceed Clinton’s as to make the comparison almost ludicrous.

Though few statements match the audacity of his statement about his role in questioning Obama’s citizenship, Trump has built a cottage industry around stretching the truth. According to POLITICO’s five-day analysis, Trump averaged about one falsehood every three minutes and 15 seconds over nearly five hours of remarks.

In raw numbers, that’s 87 erroneous statements in five days.

Some metrics on Trump’s statements this week:

Number of appearances: six speeches, one town hall, seven TV interviews, zero press availabilities, 37 tweets

Combined length of remarks (speeches, interviews): four hours, 43 minutes

Raw number of misstatements, exaggerations, falsehoods: 87

Rate: One untruth every 3.25 minutes

Here is a week’s worth of Trump’s factual transgressions:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/sto...ck-week-214287


Politico Magazine
9-25-16