Trump’s Week of Errors, Exaggerations and Flat-out FalsehoodsPOLITICO Magazine subjected the GOP frontrunner to our fact-checking process. This is the result.
By DANIEL LIPPMAN, DARREN SAMUELSOHN and ISAAC ARNSDORF
March 13, 2016
Donald Trump says he is a truthful man. “Maybe truthful to a fault,” he boasted last week at a North Carolina rally where one of his supporters sucker punched a protester.
But truthful he is not.
With the GOP front-runner scooping up delegates in a march toward the Republican nomination, POLITICO subjected a week’s worth of his words to our magazine’s fact-checking process. We chronicled 4.6 hours of stump speeches and press conferences, from a rally in Concord, N.C., on Monday to a rally on Friday in St. Louis.
The result: more than five dozen statements deemed mischaracterizations, exaggerations, or simply false – the kind of stuff that would have been stripped from one of our stories, or made the whole thing worthy of the spike.
It equates to roughly one misstatement every five minutes on average.From warning of the death of Christianity in America to claiming that he is taking no money from donors, the Manhattan billionaire and reality-show celebrity said something far from truthful many times over to the thousands of people packed into his raucous rallies. His remarks represent an extraordinary mix of inaccurate claims about domestic and foreign policy and personal and professional boasts that rarely measure up when checked against primary sources.
Many were straight-up wrong, such as his claim that the United States has a “$500 billion a year trade deficit with China,” which has been debunked over and over by fact checkers, and his statement that he never settles lawsuits, when in fact he has.
In other instances, Trump stretches the limits of reality to distort the records of his rivals. Marco Rubio was a main target last week and saw Trump twist the truth about his immigration position to warn voters that the senator is “totally in favor of amnesty.”
Then there are the seemingly small falsehoods, piled one atop another. Trump misstates the timing of things – an omnibus spending bill, for example, was called “the craziest thing I’ve ever seen six weeks ago” when in fact it was a spending package passed in December. He exaggerates polls and rankings of other things – such as his position among Hispanics and how he performs in Wall Street Journal polls. He even claims ownership of a successful winery that denies any ownership tie to the GOP front-runner.
That Trump so frequently ventures so far from the truth perhaps shouldn’t surprise given how much of his campaign is unorthodox. Offensive barbs against Muslims, Mexicans, women and people with disabilities would have quickly sunk the fortunes of other White House candidates but they haven’t hurt the real estate mogul’s standing in the polls, or, more importantly, with Republican voters.
Certainly, many politicians stretch the truth – the practice of political fact-checking began long before the 2016 election cycle. But none so much as Trump. These untruths – strung together as they are in all of his speeches – have helped drive one of the most rapid ascents in modern presidential campaign history. Stephen Colbert once invented a word to define the political discourse of the time. “Truthiness,” the comedian declared on his debut episode in 2005, was the truth as felt in one’s heart and gut, not what was written up in reference books. A decade later, Trump has taken the idea and run (for president) with it.
The Trump campaign did not respond to attempts to get comment for this story or these individual instances of inaccuracies.
Here’s POLITICO’s run-down of a week in the life of a Donald Trump fact-check:
(More at link)
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