WASHINGTON—In his second full week after the November midterm elections, Donald Trump made a mere — mere for him — 29 false claims. The next week, he returned to form. Trump made 91 false claims in the week ending on Sunday, 11th-most of any week of his presidency. He made 44 of the false claims on a one-day trip to Mississippi, during which he held two campaign rallies for Republican Senate candidate Cindy Hyde-Smith, who won her runoff race the next day, and a roundtable on prison reform. He added 15 more false claims on the same day: 12 in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, three in his exchange with reporters before he boarded the Marine One presidential helicopter.Many of the rally false claims were the same scripted lies he deployed in early November before the rest of the midterm elections. In another exchange with reporters later in the week, he added some brazen new lies about his pursuit of a development project in Moscow during the presidential campaign — falsely insisting that he was “very open” about this effort during the campaign. In fact, until former lawyer Michael Cohen admitted to special counsel Robert Mueller last week that Trump’s company worked on the proposed project until mid-2016, Trump had repeatedly insisted that he had no recent business links to Russia. He had never said during the campaign that his Moscow push had taken place throughout the first year of his candidacy.Trump has now made 3,924 false claims for the first 682 days of his presidency, an average of 5.8 per day. The average is now double what it was at the end of 2017. After averaging 2.9 false claims per day in 2017, he is averaging 8.9 per day in 2018.Now you can stay on top of Donald Trump’s lies and false claims like never before with Daniel Dale’s new Trumpcheck newsletter. Sign up here.If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of “false claims,” not lies? You can read our detailed expla ...
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