Well done, Donald.
It takes a relentless pursuit of the untruth to tick off 10 000 lies in a single presidency, but your man Donnie has done it with ease.
Some of those lies are relatively harmless, whilst others illustrate just what lengths he will go to to protect his tiny little…ego.
To ‘celebrate’ the landmark, the Guardian ran through some of the weirdest and most memorable, starting with a recent example:
‘The doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby’:
This past weekend, Trump repeated what has become one of the more frighteningly dishonest claims from the right lately regarding abortion.
“The baby is born. The mother meets with the doctor. They take care of the baby. They wrap the baby beautifully. And then the doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby.”
The fearmongering comments echo previous lies about state laws on abortion that Trump has made, such as a State of the Union address claim that a New York law would allow for “a baby to be ripped from the mother’s womb moments before birth”.
Late-term abortions, the subject of both of these incorrect claims, are very rare and only occur when the pregnancy poses a threat to a mother’s health or there are dire fetal medical conditions.
There is not a doubt in my mind that Trump has paid for at least one abortion during his lifetime.
‘First raises for our military in 10 years’:
In May of last year, Trump bragged to a gathering of military families that he had given them a raise…
Service members have received a pay raise every year since 1961.
Imagine serving in the US military and thinking Donnie cares about you, when his bone spurs kept from ever fulfilling his duties.
‘I won the popular vote’:
One particularly pernicious lie that Trump has stuck to is that millions of votes were cast illegally in the 2016 election in favor of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. The number just so happens to make up for the nearly 3 million votes by which he lost the popular vote, and is so outrageous that even some of his ardent supporters had trouble explaining it without falling into logical traps.
That’s the first example of his tiny little ego needing protection, which leads us nicely to Trump and the biggest inauguration crowd ever:
In one of the earliest and most absurd claims of his young administration Trump said he had up to 1.5 million people in attendance for his inauguration, making it “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period”, which was the lie Sean Spicer infamously relayed on his behalf. Trump’s number was a vast overestimate.
A government photographer even edited official pictures of the inaugurationto make the crowd appear bigger, following a personal intervention from Trump, according to documents.
It was a “massive field of people … packed”, Trump said at CIA headquarters the following day, adding that God had stopped it from raining that day. (It in fact rained.)
One of those photos above shows Trump’s inauguration, and the other shows Obama’s. I think you know which is which.
Thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered on 9/11
During the campaign in 2015, Trump made the fantastical claim that he had watched “thousands and thousands” of Muslims cheering in New Jersey during the 9/11 attacks.
“It was on television. I saw it … There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down,” he said on ABC.
No one has been able to find any evidence that this ever happened, but Trump has stood by his story all the same.
He saw it on telly, but nobody else did. Why bother with the truth when you can just make stuff up to suit your narrative?
Also, this tweet, which was deleted a full two years after he sent it:
There’s also his claims that Obama was born in Kenya, which helped propel him to the White House, and countless others over the years.
Like that time he forced his wife to say he was good in bed, or said that wind turbines cause cancer, or lied about his father being born in Germany.
Here’s the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, at the time of writing:
His most oft-repeated lie is the Wall:
No, Trump’s wall is not yet being built. Congress inserted specific language in its appropriations bill that none of the $1.57 billion appropriated for border protection may be used for prototypes of a concrete wall that Trump observed while in California. The money can be used only for bollard fencing and levee fencing, or for replacement of existing fencing.
The same restrictions were included in the spending bill Trump signed on Feb. 15, 2019. Trump appears to acknowledge the renovations, except he persists in claiming it is a wall. All told, Congress has funded about 175 miles of barriers.
Trump has also tapped a Treasury Department asset forfeiture fund to build 30 miles and unused Pentagon funding to fund 53 miles. That adds up to a little under 260 miles, which Trump-speak often gets translated to 400 miles.
In graph form, Donnie is actually speeding up as his presidency rolls on:
The mind boggles.
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