Donald Trump and his assault on truth The President's falsehoods, misleading claims and flat-out lies

Book - 2020

The Fact Checker staff of the Washington Post presents a collection of selected statements made by President Donald Trump since January 2017 and their analysis, both graphical and textual.

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Subjects
Genres
Quotations
Published
New York : Scribner 2020.
Language
English
Corporate Author
Washington Post Company
Corporate Author
Washington Post Company (-)
Other Authors
Glenn Kessler (author), Salvador (Journalist) Rizzo, Meg (Journalist) Kelly
Edition
First Scribner trade paperback edition
Physical Description
xxxi, 345 pages : illustrations, map ; 23 cm
ISBN
9781982151072
  • Introduction: 16,000 Falsehoods
  • A Rising Tide: Trump's False or Misleading Claims
  • 1. The Biggest Whoppers: "Mexico's Paying"
  • One Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
  • 2. Trump on Trump: "I Call It Truthful Hyperbole"
  • Trump's Attacks on Democratic Cities: "Rat-Infested Mess"
  • 3. Trump and His Enemies: "I Call Them Animals"
  • "I'm Pretty Good at Estimating Crowd Sizes"
  • 4. Boasts to the Base: "You're the Super-Elite!"
  • Sharpiegate
  • 5. The Twitter Presidency: "He needs to Tweet Like We Need to Eat"
  • Trump Tilting at Windmills
  • 6. Trump on Immigration: "They're Bringing Crime"
  • It's All Good: Trump's Flips on Border Arrests
  • 7. Trump on Economics and Trade: "The Best Economy Ever!"
  • Not Quite So Dire: Trump's Trade Deficit Claims
  • The Strange Case of the Phantom Factory Openings
  • 8. Trump on Foreign Policy: "We Fell in Love"
  • Trump's Crystal Ball: "I Predicted Osama bin Laden"
  • 9. Trump on Impeachment: "A Perfect Phone Call"
  • 10. Trump and Coronavirus: "Their New Hoax"
  • Conclusion: Toward a Resurgence of Truth
  • "They're Pinocchio"
  • Appendix: Anatomy of a Trump Rally: "Is There a Better Place?"
  • A Note on Sources
  • Acknowledgments
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

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 Post staffers 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.