Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.
One of the most punctilious trackers of President Donald Trump’s dishonesty revealed Friday that his mendacity has reached new heights in recent weeks. In the last seven days, the Toronto Star reported, Trump made 100 false claims in public, coming just under his total of 103 false claims the previous week.
“As usual, part of the explanation for the barrage of lies and other dishonesty was simply that Trump talked a lot,” explained the Star‘s Washington Bureau Chief Daniel Dale.
But this rate represents a huge upsurge nevertheless. Dale reports that in prior months, Trump has never exceeded more than 60 falsehoods per week — an impressive sum itself by any measure.
Overall, his rate of dishonesty is accelerating.
“The pace of the president’s dishonesty has increased significantly in 2018,” Dale writes. “After averaging 2.9 false claims per day in 2017, he is averaging 5.1 per day in 2018.”
It’s easy enough to write these findings off as obvious. Every reasonable observer will conclude that Trump is a liar, and even when he’s not actively lying, he clearly has little regard for the truth of his statements.
And yet the increasing rate of Trump’s dishonesty surely tells us something important. As he plows through his second year in office, he appears to be more prone to making wild and untrue claims, perhaps suggesting an underlying anxiety about his myriad failures as president, the looming special counsel’s investigation, and the upcoming midterm elections that will be seen as a referendum on his time in the White House.
While Trump has always felt compelled to obscure the truth, he seems to think it’s important to mislead the public now more than ever.
For a full accounting of Trump’s recent falsehoods, visit the Toronto Star.
Cody Fenwick is a reporter and editor. Follow him on Twitter @codytfenwick.
