Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post has finally gotten so fed up with Donald Trump's ridiculous lies that he's literally invented a whole new category of liar just for him in the annals of the paper's fact checking columns.
It was President Trump’s signature campaign promise: he would build a wall along the nation’s southern border and it would be paid for by Mexico.
Shortly after becoming president, Trump dropped the Mexico part, turning to Congress for the funds instead. When that too failed — Congress earlier this year appropriated money for border security that could not be spent on a concrete wall — Trump nevertheless declared victory: “We’ve started building our wall,” he said in a speech on March 29. “I’m so proud of it.”
Despite the facts, which have been cited numerous times by fact checkers, Trump repeated his false assertion on an imaginary wall 86 times in the seven months before the midterm elections, according to a database of false and misleading claims maintained by The Post.
Trump’s willingness to constantly repeat false claims has posed a unique challenge to fact checkers. Most politicians quickly drop a Four-Pinocchio claim, either out of a duty to be accurate or concern that spreading false information could be politically damaging.
Not Trump. The president keeps going long after the facts are clear, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to replace the truth with his own, far more favorable, version of it. He is not merely making gaffes or misstating things, he is purposely injecting false information into the national conversation.
To accurately reflect this phenomenon, The Washington Post Fact Checker is introducing a new category – the Bottomless Pinocchio. That dubious distinction will be awarded to politicians who repeat a false claim so many times that they are, in effect, engaging in campaigns of disinformation.
The bar for the Bottomless Pinocchio is high: the claims must have received three or four Pinocchios from The Fact Checker and they must have been repeated at least 20 times. Twenty is a sufficiently robust number that there can be no question the politician is aware his or her facts are wrong. The list of Bottomless Pinocchios will be maintained on its own landing page.
The Fact Checker has not identified statements from any other current elected official who meets the standard other than Trump. In fact, 14 statements made by the president immediately qualify for the list.
Among Trump's Bottomless Pinocchio claims so far: building the wall will stop drugs when the DEA has repeatedly said it won't help (tunnels, subs and planes bring in nearly all drugs, not cars and trucks) that US Steel is building new American plants when it has made no such announcement, and my favorite, that ICE and the Border Patrol have apprehended and deported more MS-13 gang members than actually exist.
I'm not surprised that it took two years for Kessler to finally stop arguing whether or not Trump is lying and lying on purpose, he is, and it looks like finally our media is starting to get it.
Sadly, it's years too late. The damage to America has already been wrought, and there's far more to come.
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