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How we counted Donald Trump's lies

In Donald Trump's first term, fact-checkers from The Washington Post, the Toronto Star, and CNN meticulously gathered Trump's false or misleading statements. The Post reported 30,573 false or misleading claims in four years, an average of more than 20.9 per day.

While these trackers written by fact-checkers are not maintained anymore, our analysis is built on the work of US-based journalists who reported on Trump's remarks at various events in the past week, including the inauguration ceremony. We gathered work done by journalists at CNN, AP, the New York Times, and others and analysed Trump's speeches and posts that flew below the radar in this tumultuous week. We concluded that Trump made 22 false or strongly misleading claims on inauguration day and 72 in his first week in office.

More about the methodology

In the absence of 24/7 fact-checkers, our analysis combines the works of different journalists from different outlets over the span of these last days. Tracking false or strongly misleading claims is not an exact science, and multiple issues arise:

  • If he made multiple, somewhat related false or misleading claims in, for example, one short section of a speech, should it count as one or more? In our analysis, we count this as one instance.

  • What is a subjective feeling, and what is objectively wrong? For example, should his claim that there is an invasion at the USA's southern border count as strongly misleading? We aired on the cautious side and tried only to count claims that were objectively untrue.

  • What's an accident, and what is a misleading claim? For example, Trump claimed that 1.5 million people live in Gaza, whereas actually, more than two million people live in Gaza. In this and similar instances, we did not count it as a misleading claim if we could reasonably assume it was a mistake.

We focused on claims that we were able to verify. This means the actual number of misleading statements is potentially higher. 

Read the fact-checks & Trump's original remarks