Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President's Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies

by The Washington Post Fact Checker Staff

Overview

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER

In perilous times, facts, expertise, and truth are indispensable. President Trump’s flagrant disregard for the truth and his self-aggrandizing exaggerations, specious misstatements, and bald-faced lies have been rigorously documented and debunked since the first day of his presidency by The Washington Post’s Fact Checker staff.

Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth is based on the only comprehensive compilation and analysis of the more than 16,000 fallacious statements that Trump has uttered since the day of his inauguration. He has repeated many of his most outrageous claims dozens or even hundreds of times as he has sought to bend reality to his political fantasy and personal whim.

Drawing on Trump’s tweets, press conferences, political rallies, and TV appearances, The Washington Post identifies his most frequently used misstatements, biggest whoppers, and most dangerous deceptions. This book unpacks his errant statements about the economy, immigration, the impeachment hearings, foreign policy, and, of critical concern now, the coronavirus crisis as it unfolded.

Fascinating, startling, and even grimly funny, Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth by The Washington Post is the essential, authoritative record of Trump’s shocking disregard for facts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982151072
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	06/02/2020
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	577,638
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

The Washington Post created “The Fact Checker” column in 2007 and it has held Democrats, Republicans, and advocacy groups accountable for their claims by awarding “Pinocchios” for false or misleading statements. Glenn Kessler has been editor and chief writer of “The Fact Checker” since 2011 and has worked at The Washington Post since 1998. Salvador Rizzo is a reporter for “The Fact Checker” and Meg Kelly is a video editor and reporter for “The Fact Checker.” The team in 2019 earned an honorable mention in the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting.

Table of Contents

Introduction: 16,000 Falsehoods Glenn Kessler ix

A Rising Tide: Trump's False or Misleading Claims xxxiii

1 The Biggest Whoppers: "Mexico's Paying" Meg Kelly 1

One Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day 23

2 Trump on Trump: "I Call It Truthful Hyperbole" Meg Kelly 25

Trump's Attacks on Democratic Cities: "Rat-Infested Mess" 47

3 Trump and His Enemies: "I Call Them Animals" Salvador Rizzo 51

"I'm Pretty Good at Estimating Crowd Sizes" 75

4 Boasts to the Base: "You're the Super-Elite!" Salvador Rizzo 79

Sharpiegate 97

5 The Twitter Presidency: "He needs to Tweet Like We Need to Eat" Meg Kelly 101

Trump Tilting at Windmills 129

6 Trump on Immigration: "They're Bringing Crime" Salvador Rizzo 133

It's All Good: Trump's Flips on Border Arrests 157

7 Trump on Economics and Trade: "The Best Economy Ever!" Glenn Kessler 159

Not Quite So Dire: Trump's Trade Deficit Claims 176

The Strange Case of the Phantom Factory Openings 185

8 Trump on Foreign Policy: "We Fell in Love" Glenn Kessler 187

Trump's Crystal Ball: "I Predicted Osama bin Laden" 217

9 Trump on Impeachment: "A Perfect Phone Call" Glenn Kessler 219

10 Trump and Coronavirus: "Their New Hoax" Glenn Kessler 249

Conclusion: Toward a Resurgence of Truth Glenn Kessler 259

"They're Pinocchio" 273

Appendix: Anatomy of a Trump Rally: "Is There a Better Place?" Salvador Rizzo 279

A Note on Sources 337

Acknowledgments 341

Editorial Reviews

06/15/2020

President Trump made 16,241 “false or misleading” statements between taking office on Jan. 20, 2017, and Jan. 20, 2020, according to the staff of the Washington Post’s Fact Checker. In this comprehensive yet stultifying survey, Fact Checker editor Glenn Kessler and reporters Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly document Trump’s “most egregious and important false claims” (Mexico will pay for the border wall), as well as more obscure distortions (he negotiated peace between Ethiopia and Eritrea), explain why they’re off-base, and look for patterns to understand why and how he twists the truth and how it’s affected his presidency. The authors also discuss the difficulties of applying the Fact Checker’s “Pinocchio scale” (one Pinocchio for “selective telling of the truth”; four for “a whopper”), which was created in 2007 to evaluate specific claims made in order to advance policy agendas, to a president whose supporters seem unperturbed by his “constant stream” of falsehoods and exaggerations. Though illustrated with insightful sidebars and graphs, the book’s analysis doesn’t go far beyond noting that Trump’s mendacity has roots in his real estate and entertainment careers, and is not the liability it would be for other politicians. Readers will be more exhausted than enlightened. (June)

Publishers Weekly

A great public service of a book.” –Susan B. Glasser, The New Yorker

“An authoritative and pull-no-punches guide through Trump's alternative universe....a reader-friendly reference for voters, reporters and editors who soon will be seeking clarity and context once the fall campaign kicks into full swing.” –The Record

“An extremely valuable chronicle.” –Kirkus Reviews STARRED REVIEW

“Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth encapsulates the duplicity we’ve been subjected to these past 3½ years in a way that hopefully will deter our future leaders from thinking truth-telling is optional. No pithy hot takes. Just great journalism.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

From the Publisher

★ 2020-04-29
All politicians lie. But the current occupant of the White House? Yikes….

Kessler, editor of the Washington Post“Fact Checker” column, allows that every recent president is associated with “one big lie”—e.g., not having sex with “that woman,” fudging about overflights over the Soviet Union, dismissing concerns about illness. Donald Trump is transcendent. He is, by Kessler and his colleagues’ account, “the most mendacious president in U.S. history,” the author not of one big and sometimes necessary lie but of thousands of little, useless ones. As of the third anniversary of his inauguration, they reckon, the lie count was 16,241—which means that Trump publicly lied 15 times per day on average, though some days were richer than others, such as November 5, 2018, which rang in 139 false claims. The lies are part of a program of an attack on truth, the authors assert, and given that “Republicans have grown less concerned about presidents being honest than they were a decade ago,” the lies find a willing audience. Parsing those 16,241 lies, the Poststaffers calculate that immigration is the single subject most liable to be lied about, “accounting for 15 percent of the total…we fact-checked in the first three years of Trump’s presidency.” But everything else is fair game, too, with concomitant fits of projection—accusing others of lying, for instance—and refusal to accept responsibility for anything except the rare success. Then there are the simple misunderstandings, as when he called his impeachment “illegal and unconstitutional” even though, Kessler and company observe, “it’s literally spelled out in the Constitution.” Most valuable, in this rather depressing catalog of untruths, are the fact checkers’ point-by-point analyses, lie by lie, of the relative falsehoods uttered, measured by “Pinocchios.” They even give Trump credit for those extremely unusual moments when his outbursts are “mostly accurate.”

Readers will want to add in the many COVID-19 falsehoods, but all in all, this is an extremely valuable chronicle.

Kirkus Reviews