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Donald Trump, the President of the United States, has made a number of controversial statements which are false or misleading. Trump has made so many false or misleading statements that commentators and fact-checkers have described the rate of his falsehoods as unprecedented in politics. Trump also has "a proclivity to repeat, over and over, many of his false or misleading statements." As of August 2018, "they have counted nearly 150 claims that the president has repeated at least three times, some with breathtaking frequency."Cite error: The <ref> tag has too many names (see the help page).

Business career

Within years of expanding his father's property development business into Manhattan in the early 1970s, Trump attracted the attention of The New York Times for his "brash, controversial style," with one real estate financier observing in 1976, "His deals are dramatic, but they haven't come into being. So far, the chief beneficiary of his creativity has been his public image." Der Scutt, the prominent architect who designed Trump Tower, said of Trump in 1976, "He's extremely aggressive when he sells, maybe to the point of overselling. Like, he'll say the convention center is the biggest in the world, when it really isn't. He'll exaggerate for the purpose of making a sale."

The architect Philip Johnson said of Trump in 1984, "Oh, he lies a great deal."

In 2018, journalist Jonathan Greenberg released audio recordings from 1984 in which Trump, posing as his own spokesman "John Barron," made false assertions of his wealth to secure a higher ranking on the Forbes 400 list of wealthy Americans, including claiming he owned "in excess of 90 percent" of his family's business.

A 1984 GQ profile of Trump quoted him stating, "I own the whole block on Central Park South and Avenue of the Americas." GQ noted that the two buildings Trump owned in that area "probably comprise less than a sixth of the block."

Alair Townsend, a former budget director and deputy mayor of New York City during the 1980s, and a former publisher of Crain's New York Business, said "I wouldn't believe Donald Trump if his tongue were notarized." Leona Helmsley later used this line as her own when she spoke about Trump in her November 1990 interview in Playboy magazine.

His 1987 book Trump: The Art of the Deal stated, "I play to people's fantasies. I call it truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion."

When the stock market crashed in October 1987, Trump told the press that he had “sold all of his stock last month” and took no losses. But SEC filings showed that he still owned large stakes in some companies. Forbes calculated that Trump had lost $19 million on his Resorts International holdings alone.

Challenging estimates of his net worth he considered too low, in 1989 Trump stated, "I have very little debt." Reuters reported Trump owed $4 billion to more than 70 banks at the beginning of 1990.

In 1997, Ben Berzin Jr., who had been tasked with recovering at least some of the $100 million his bank had lent Trump, said "During the time that I dealt with Mr. Trump, I was continually surprised by his mastery of situational ethics. He does not seem to be able to differentiate between fact and fiction."

David Fahrenthold investigated the long history of Trump's claims about his charitable giving and found little evidence the claims are true. Following Fahrenthold's reporting, the Attorney General of New York opened an inquiry into the Donald J. Trump Foundation's fundraising practices, and ultimately issued a "notice of violation" ordering the Foundation to stop raising money in New York. The Foundation had to admit it engaged in self-dealing practices to benefit Trump, his family, and businesses. Fahrenthold won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for his coverage of Trump's claimed charitable giving and casting "doubt on Donald Trump's assertions of generosity toward charities."

In 1996, Trump claimed he wagered $1 million on 20-to-1 odds in a Las Vegas heavyweight title boxing match between Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson. The Las Vegas Sun reported that "while everyone is careful not to call Trump a liar," no one in a position to know about such a sizable wager was aware of it.

A 1998 New York Observer article entitled "Tricky Donald Trump Beats Jerry Nadler in Game of Politics" reported that "Nadler flatly calls Mr. Trump a 'liar'," quoting Nadler stating, "Trump got $6 million in the dead of night when no one knew anything about it" by slipping a provision into a $200 billion federal transportation bill.

Promoting his Trump University after its formation in 2004, Trump asserted he would handpick all its instructors. Michael Sexton, former president of the venture, stated in a 2012 deposition that Trump selected none of the instructors.

During a 2005 deposition in a defamation lawsuit he initiated about his worth, Trump stated "My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings... and that can change rapidly from day to day."

In The Art of the Deal

Tony Schwartz is a ghostwriter and credited co-author of Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987). In July 2016, Schwartz was interviewed by Jane Mayer for two articles in The New Yorker. In them he described Trump, who was running for president at the time, highly unfavorably, and described how he came to regret writing The Art of the Deal. When Schwartz wrote The Art of the Deal, he created the phrase "truthful hyperbole" as an "artful euphemism" to describe Trump's "loose relationship with the truth." This passage from the book provides the context, written in Trump's voice: "I play to people's fantasies...People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent form of exaggeration — and it's a very effective form of promotion." He said that Trump "loved the phrase".

Schwartz said that "deceit" is never "innocent." He added, "'Truthful hyperbole' is a contradiction in terms. It's a way of saying, 'It's a lie, but who cares?'" Schwartz repeated his criticism on Good Morning America and Real Time with Bill Maher, saying he "put lipstick on a pig".

In an article entitled "The Swedish Whopper: Donald Trump's Long-standing Struggle With the Truth," the Trump family lie is revealed to be their claim, maintained for two generations, that they are Swedish, when in fact they are Germans. Donald's father, Fred Trump, "sought to pass himself off as Swedish amid anti-German sentiment sparked by World War II." The lie was repeated by Fred's son Donald, who, in The Art of the Deal (1987), repeated and embellished the lie by claiming that his grandfather, Friedrich Trump, "came here from Sweden as a child", even though he left his family and emigrated from his home town, Kallstadt, Germany, in 1885, when he was 16 years old. In the same book, he also claimed that his father was "born in New Jersey to Swedish parents; in fact, he was born in the Bronx to German parents," as Wayne Barrett pointed out in 1992.

2016 presidential campaign

Within six months of announcing his presidential candidacy, FactCheck.org declared him the "King of Whoppers," stating, "In the 12 years of FactCheck.org's existence, we've never seen his match."

Trump has promulgated a number of conspiracy theories which have lacked substance. These have included Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories from 2011 ("birther" theories); that Ted Cruz's father was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 2016; that he would have won the popular vote in the 2016 election (in addition to his electoral college win) if there had not been "millions" of illegal voters in that election cycle; and the Spygate conspiracy theory alleging that the Barack Obama administration planted a spy inside Trump's 2016 presidential campaign to assist Hillary Clinton win the 2016 US presidential election. The latter claim has been widely described as blatantly false.

Trump also made his Trump Tower wiretapping allegations in 2017, for which the Department of Justice has said evidence has yet to be provided. In January 2018, Trump claimed that texts between FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were tantamount to "treason", but The Wall Street Journal reviewed them and concluded that the texts "show no evidence of a conspiracy against" Trump.

Trump is a friend of "professional conspiracy theorist" Alex Jones, and has appeared on his show. When InfoWars and Jones were banned from Apple, YouTube, Facebook, and Spotify, Infowars editor-at-large Paul Joseph Watson called it "censorship" and used the well-known Trump–Jones friendship as an argument: "Infowars is widely credited with having played a key role in electing Donald Trump."

Presidency

Trump's presidency began with a series of falsehoods originated by Trump himself. The day after his inauguration, he falsely accused the media of lying about the size of the inauguration crowd. Then he exaggerated the size, and White House press secretary Sean Spicer backed up his claims. When Spicer was accused of intentionally misstating the figures, Kellyanne Conway, in an interview with NBC's Chuck Todd, defended Spicer by stating that he merely presented "alternative facts". Todd responded by saying "alternative facts are not facts. They're falsehoods."

As president, Trump has frequently made false statements in public speeches and remarks. Trump uttered "at least one false or misleading claim per day on 91 of his first 99 days" in office according to The New York Times, and 1,318 total in his first 263 days in office according to the "Fact Checker" political analysis column of The Washington Post. On Trump's 601st day in office, their tally exceeded 5,000 false or misleading claims, and it had risen to an average of 8.3 per day from 4.9 during his first 100 days in office. According to one study, the rate of false statements has increased, with the percentage of his words that are part of a false claim rising over the course of his presidency. In general, news organizations have been hesitant to label these statements as "lies".

Glenn Kessler, a fact-checker for The Washington Post, told Dana Milbank that, in his six years on the job, "'there's no comparison' between Trump and other politicians. Kessler says politicians' statements get his worst rating — four Pinocchios — 15 percent to 20 percent of the time. Clinton is about 15 percent. Trump is 63 percent to 65 percent." Kessler also wrote: "President Trump is the most fact-challenged politician that The Fact Checker has ever encountered ... the pace and volume of the president's misstatements means that we cannot possibly keep up."

A poll in May 2018 found that "just 13 percent of Americans consider Trump honest and trustworthy".

The Editorial Board of The New York Times took this telling sideswipe at Trump when commenting on the unfitness of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court: "A perfect nominee for a president with no clear relation to the truth."

See also

• Fear: Trump in the White House
• Fire and Fury
• The Making of Donald Trump
• Timeline of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections
• Timeline of investigations into Trump and Russia (2017)
• Timeline of investigations into Trump and Russia (2018)

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External links

• "Trump and the Truth", a series of 14 articles by different authors in The New Yorker, starting September 2, 2016.
• "Our Dishonest President", a seven-part series by The Times Editorial Board, Los Angeles Times, starting April 2, 2017.

Fact-checker archives

• PolitiFact
• FactCheck.org
• The Washington Post
• Toronto Star

• Donald Trump