Lies and Half-Truths

We’ve had nothing but four years of lies and half-truths from a President who calls everything else “fake news”

According to the Washington Post Fact-Checkers Database, President Trump told an average of 5 lies a day during his first 100 days in office. This rose to an average of 12 lies a day by the end of his first two years in office, and to 23 lies a day by July of this year, when the total surpassed the 20,000 mark. 

Here are just a few of the lies Trump told during the televised debate with Joe Biden on September 29th, fact-checked by the Associated Press: https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-college-football-ap-fact-check-joe-biden-virus-outbreak-65e9180ca829616cff33dd6c1398170b

  • Trump asserted that the U.S. armed forces will be delivering hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 vaccine doses to the public as soon as a vaccine is available. The Pentagon says there is no such plan for national vaccine distribution by military personnel.
  • Trump claimed that if Biden had been President, there would have been 2 million people dead from COVID-19 by now, instead of 200,000. There is absolutely no basis for that claim.
  • Trump accused Biden of opposing Trump’s travel restrictions on China and wanting to leave the country “wide open” for infected travellers to enter. In fact, Biden supported the travel restrictions and never spoke against them.
  • Trump repeatedly, and falsely, claims to have banned travel from China. He restricted it. More than 8,000 Chinese and foreign nationals based in the two COVID hotspots entered the U.S. in the first three months after the travel restrictions were imposed. More than 27,000 Americans also returned from mainland China in the first month after the restrictions took effect. U.S. officials lost track of more than 1,600 of them who were supposed to be monitored for virus exposure.
  • Trump claimed that the sheriff of Portland, Oregon sheriff just came out today and he said I support President Trump.” The sheriff, Mike Reese, then tweeted: “I have never supported Donald Trump and will never support him.”
  • Trump promised that “drug prices will be coming down 80 or 90%.” There’s no plan on the horizon that would lower drug prices as dramatically as Trump claims.
  • Trump criticized Barack Obama for leaving federal judicial vacancies unfilled before they left office in January 2017. They were unfilled because of refusal by the Republican-controlled Senate to confirm the appointments.
  • Trump claimed his campaign rallies were all outside and that “so far we have had no problem whatsoever” with the coronavirus. In fact, Trump held an indoor rally in Tulsa in late June, which according to the Tulsa City-County Health Department director “likely contributed” to a dramatic surge in new coronavirus cases there. 
  • Trump said to Biden: “You didn’t do very well on the swine flu. H1N1. You were a disaster.” In fact, the swine flu pandemic of 2009 killed far fewer people in the United States than the coronavirus is killing now. 
  • Trump claimed that mailmen in West Virginia were “selling ballots.” There is no evidence of postal carriers selling ballots in West Virginia.

Four more years of lies and half-truths will leave this country with no common basis for understanding what is true and what is not…

According to psychologist Dr. Bella DePaulo, who specializes in the psychology of lying, the lies of Donald Trump are very different from the lies that ordinary people make every day.

Various studies have shown that, on average, people may lie once or twice a day. About half of those lies are “self-serving” lies, and a quarter are “kind” lies, designed to save people embarrassment or hurt. only 1-2% are categorized as “cruel” lies.

President Trump has been lying, on average, almost once an hour. He tells 6.6 times as many self-serving lies as kind ones. And Trump’s lies differ from yours or mine primary in their cruelty. An astonishing 50 percent of Trump’s lies were hurtful or disparaging.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/i-study-liars-ive-never-seen-one-like-president-trump/2017/12/07/4e529efe-da3f-11e7-a841-2066faf731ef_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-cards_hp-posteverything%3Ahomepage%2Fcard&utm_term=.7cc9bc247ee9