WASHINGTON — Donald Trump loves to beat up the national news media, accusing them of inventing “fake news” about him and his presidency.
No matter how much detail and other evidence there is for each story, he dismisses all of it as pure “fakery,” “lies” and that old standby, “a witch hunt.”
Until relatively recently, he insisted that there was not a shred of truth to our intelligence community’s finding that Russia was conducting a massive cyberwar against the U.S., with the aim of influencing voters, interfering with our elections and helping elect Trump.
While he grudgingly confessed, after his summit talks with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, that the Kremlin may be behind it, he still clung tenaciously to the myth that Russia was not the culprit, and it could have been someone else.
Trump has never publicly condemned Moscow for its disinformation campaign conducted via American websites and social media networks, despite the indictments of at least 12 Russians implicated in the scheme. Not to mention the recent reports from Facebook of a “sophisticated disinformation operation on its platform that engaged in divisive messaging ahead of the U.S. midterm elections,” according to the Washington Post.
Facebook, which eventually shut down the false pages, said the content dealt with topics such as race, fascism and feminism. A top corporate executive described the cyber-attack as an “arms race” to manipulate Americans on a broad range of divisive issues.
One of the most frequently used pages “had links to the Internet Research Agency (IRA), the Kremlin-backed organization of Russian operatives that flooded Facebook with disinformation around the 2016 election,” the Post reported last week.
In spite of such stories, Trump continues to have a field day attacking the news media for supposedly “fake news” via his Twitter account. But while Trump’s accusations have drawn a lot of notice, especially among his supporters, his own false or exaggerated claims about himself and his policies haven’t received the attention they deserve.
Trump, it turns out, is the preeminent source for “false news” in Washington, according to the Post’s ace Fact Checker Glenn Kessler.
“As of the end of the 558th day of his presidency, July 31, Trump had made 4,229 ‘false or misleading claims’ — a jump of 978 in just two months,” Kessler reported last week.
A large number of Trump’s claims are flat-out false, and now he’s making them at an accelerated rate.
“The president appears especially emboldened to play fast and loose with the truth during campaign rallies, where his strongest supporters flock to hear him,” Kessler says.
At a rally in Tampa last week, Kessler counted 35 false or misleading claims.
One of them is the assertion that his tax reductions are “the biggest tax cuts in U.S. history,” a claim that Kessler says he has made 88 times. They aren’t. Not by a long shot.
The tax cuts — which I strongly supported, and said so in my column — could cost $2.2 trillion over 10 years. As a percentage of our Gross Domestic Product, the measure of our entire economy’s output, that would make them the eighth-largest tax cuts since 1918, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
Then there is Trump’s whopper that his long-promised wall is being built right now along the Mexican border. It isn’t. Congress didn’t give him the $25 billion he requested as a down payment. Fencing is being replaced, and only where needed.
He is telling rallies that U.S. Steel has announced the opening of six steel mills, when in fact the manufacturer has only restarted two blast furnaces. And he doesn’t mention an electronics factory that laid off its workers because of the tariffs he slapped on imports from China.
Trump often grossly exaggerates his figures. He said the trade deficit with China is $500 billion, when it is actually $375 billion.
“At the Trump rally, the president also repeated his false claim that ‘the most popular person in the history of the Republican Party is Trump.’” Kessler writes. While wildly popular among Republicans — with a 90 percent approval rating, in some surveys — he runs behind Dwight D. Eisenhower and George W. Bush at this point in their presidencies.
He even suggested that he had a higher approval rating than Abraham Lincoln when, of course, political polls didn’t exist at that time.
What would Honest Abe say about that?
Donald Lambro has been covering Washington politics for more than 50 years as a reporter, editor and commentator.
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