https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/10/president-trump-has-made-false-or-misleading-claims-over-days/
President Trump’s pitter-patter of exaggerated numbers, unwarranted boasting and outright falsehoods has continued at a remarkable pace. As of June 7, his 869th day in office, the president has made 10,796 false or misleading claims, according to the Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement the president has uttered.
The president crossed the 10,000 threshold on April 26, and he has been averaging about 16 fishy claims a day since then. From the start of his presidency, he has averaged about 12 such claims a day.
About one-fifth of these claims are about immigration, his signature issue — a percentage that has grown since the government shut down over funding for his promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. In fact, his most repeated claim — 172 times — is that his border wall is being built. Congress balked at funding the concrete barrier he envisioned, so he has tried to pitch bollard fencing and repairs of existing barriers as “a wall.”
AD
False or misleading claims about trade and the investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign each account for about 10 percent of the total.
Trump’s penchant for repeating false claims is demonstrated by the fact that The Fact Checker database has recorded more than 300 instances in which he has repeated a variation of the same claim at least three times. He also now has earned 21 “Bottomless Pinocchios,” claims that have earned Three or Four Pinocchios and which have been repeated at least 20 times.
The president’s interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News Channel during the D-Day commemorations on June 6 is emblematic of his approach to the facts. Here’s a sampling of some of his claims, drawn from the database:
AD
“They [Mexico] send in $500 billion worth of drugs, they kill 100,000 people, they ruin a million families every year if you look at that, that’s really an invasion without the guns.”
This is a flawed estimate. The White House Council of Economic Advisers estimated in a 2017 report that “the economic cost of the opioid crisis was $504.0 billion, or 2.8 percent of GDP” in 2015. But that’s not all a result of drugs coming across the border. It also “includes individuals who abuse prescription painkillers such as OxyContin and Vicodin and individuals who abuse heroin or other illicit opioids,” the report said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that prescription drugs were involved in more than 35 percent of all opioid overdose deaths in 2017.
“I would say Germany has not stepped up much, Germany’s paying 1 percent [to NATO], they should be paying much more than that. Well, think of it, 1 percent. So we protect Germany and then Germany takes advantage of us on trade.”
AD
Trump never gets this correct. There are two types of funding for NATO: direct funding and indirect funding. Direct funding, for military-related operations, maintenance and headquarters activity, is based on gross national income — the total domestic and foreign output claimed by residents of a country — and adjusted regularly. With the largest economy in NATO, the United States pays the largest share — about 22 percent. Germany is second, with about 15 percent. Indirect funding refers to how much a country's defense spending is a percentage of the gross domestic product, and NATO members have set a goal of 2 percent of GDP by 2022. Germany in 2018 spent 1.23 percent of its GDP on defense, but this money does not go to NATO.
“Secretary [Jens] Stoltenberg [of NATO] has been maybe Trump’s biggest fan, to be honest with you, he goes around — he made a speech the other day, he said, 'Without Donald Trump, maybe there would be no NATO.’”
False. Stoltenberg had been complimentary of Tru
