A year of unprecedented deception: Trump averaged 15 false claims a day in 2018

The president also simply invents faux facts

He repeatedly said U. S. Steel is building six to eight new steel plants, but that’s not true.

He said that as president, Barack Obama gave citizenship to 2,500 Iranians during the nuclear-deal negotiations, but that’s false. Over and over, Trump claimed that the Uzbek-born man who in 2017 was accused of killing eight people with a pickup truck in New York brought two dozen relatives to the United States through “chain migration.

” The real number is zero.

In one of his more preposterous statements of 2018, Trump labeled the Palm Beach Post as “fake news” for blaming him for traffic jams across the nation — when an article about the impact of low gas prices on driving habits never mentioned his name.

Sometimes, Trump simply attempts to create his own reality.

When leaders attending the United Nations General Assembly burst into laughter when Trump uttered a favorite false claim — that his administration had accomplished more in less than two years than “almost any administration in the history of our country” — the president was visibly startled and remarked he “didn’t expect that reaction.” But then he later falsely insisted to reporters the boast “was meant to get some laughter.”

In an October interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump emphatically denied he had imposed many tariffs. “I mean, other than some tariffs on steel — which is actually small, what do we have? … Where do we have tariffs?

We don’t have tariffs anywhere,” he insisted. The newspaper responded by printing a list of $305 billion worth of tariffs on many types of U. S.

imports.

Trump exaggerates when the facts are on his side.

And although there’s no question Trump can draw supporters to his

And although there’s no question Trump can draw supporters to his