Yesterday while speaking to reporters in Elko, Nevada on the tarmac next to Air Force One, President Trump engaged in what his senior adviser Kellyanne Conway might have at one point called “alternative facts.” But what the rest of the country has learned, due in no small part to the Washington Post Fact Checker’s ongoing tally of Trump’s lies, is that there’s nothing “alternative” about it — he either believes the things he says are facts, or he believes that his followers are stupid, or he himself is stupid, or some combination of the three.
After the first real accounting of what was intended to be a summary of the President’s first 100 days, he was averaging just under 5 lies — knowingly false or misleading statements — every single day. By the time of the last cumulative update in September, Trump was past 5,000 lies in just 601 days. That was an average of 8.3 per day.
But it’s the very end of that period that should be instructive because his lies haven’t simply increased in frequency — we’re now approaching a point where the President of the United States lies twice as often as a normal human laughs in a day. During the final nine days of the most recent tally, Trump was averaging 32 lies per day, and the implications of that are staggering, not only in terms of how much he’s getting away with it, but what he’s getting away with lying about.
On that desert airstrip in Nevada, Trump promised what would be major legislation if it were true: A major tax cut for “middle income” people that he insisted members of Congress were working on “around the clock” and that would be delivered “around the first of November, maybe a little before then.”
None of that is true. He made literally one hundred percent of it up on the spot.
Now, we could speculate that perhaps the members of Congress he referenced were maybe working on a tax bill, though given their history as conservatives, it is highly suspect that they would be planning a tax cut that only went to middle-income people, “not for businesses,” as the President says. That’s just not in the Republican playbook. And of course “around the clock” is just a silly thing to say. I am here working on a Sunday to let you know that Paul Ryan definitely does not work on Sundays.
But what makes the entire thing a lie, and not just a lie but made up on the spot, is that it’s impossible for ANY OF IT to be true.
Congress is not in session until November 13.
Nobody in the House is working on anything. No tax bill, not for middle-income people or anyone, nothing. And after the end of this week, the Senate will be gone for 17 days as well.
So here’s your October Surprise: Donald Trump is still a liar, and it’s only getting worse every day.
Featured image via screen capture
