WASHINGTON—Twice last week, Donald Trump told a vivid story about how he had spoken to reporters at his golf course in Scotland the day before the Brexit vote in 2016 and correctly predicted the outcome.None of this happened. He went to Scotland the day after the vote, not the day before. The day before, he offered no prediction at all.Also last week, Trump told an interviewer that both of his parents were born in the European Union. His father was born in New York City.This was an especially dishonest week, filled with bizarre lies in addition to his usual fudges and exaggerations. Trump made 57 false claims in all, tied for fifth-most of any week of his presidency.The U.S. president is on a kind of dishonesty binge. Three of his six most dishonest weeks as president have come in the last four weeks.He is now up to 2,029 false claims for the first 542 days of his presidency, an average of 3.7 per day.Among other false claims last week: Trump said U.S. gross domestic product has “doubled and tripled” since he took office, though growth was a mere 2.3 per cent in 2017; he said he had not criticized U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May in an interview the day prior, though he had, at length; he invented statistics about U.S. spending on NATO, then made up a story about how NATO members had just made new promises to dramatically increase their own spending; he offered a grossly inaccurate account of Barack Obama’s response upon learning of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.On Saturday, we published the first detailed statistical analysis of Trump’s dishonesty in office. Our main finding: Trump is uttering more false claims in recent months not just because he is talking more these days but because he is getting less truthful per word spoken. In 2017, 3.8 per cent of his words were part of a false claim. In 2018, as of July 1, it was 7.3 per cent.If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of “false claims,” no ...
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