A n American presidency has many milestones: the first 100 days, the first year, the first major piece of legislation. President Trump is shaking up the institution in all kinds of ways, the Beltway Media is always telling us. Here's a new milestone: the 2,000th lie. According to the surely exhausted fact-checkers at The Washington Post, who began a project tracking Trump's false or misleading claims over his first 100 days in office—but were forced, by the deluge of mendacity, to continue—President Very Stable Genius hit 2,001 false or misleading claims in office during his televised meeting with a group of bipartisan lawmakers Tuesday.

Like an aging arena rock band, Trump is no longer writing much new material. He goes out there and plays the hits. Each false claim the Post pulled out of Tuesday's meeting is something the Enormously Consensual President has offered up before. One of these will find itself on the trophy plaque reading, "2,000th Presidential Lie":

“We can build the wall in one year and we can build it for much less money than what they’re talking about.” (No, they can't. As the Post reminds us, reality has long dictated it's a multi-year project—probably at least four—that could cost upwards of $25 billion.)

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For the diversity visa lottery, “what’s in their hand are the worst of the worst, but they put people in that they don’t want into a lottery and the United States takes those people.” (This bears no similarities to how the lottery actually works. It is entirely a product of the president's very stable genius brain.)

“We have tremendous numbers of people and drugs pouring into our country. So in order to secure [the border] we need a wall.” (The wall will have zero effect on drug trafficking. As cartel expert Don Winslow told Esquire: "The wall is a problem. It will do absolutely jack shit to stem the flow of drugs, because the wall has gates—San Diego, El Paso, Laredo and others—which are the busiest commercial border crossings in the world, open 24/7. Over 75 percent of the illegal drugs come on trucks through those open gates. So unless you want to shut down the commerce of two countries, with dire economic consequences for both, this is cloud cuckoo land.")

Trump has parroted the line about the wall stopping drugs 17 times. He's spread this propaganda about the diversity visa lottery 12 times in two months. The wall seems to cost whatever Trump feels like it will cost at any given moment, but it's always going to be cheaper than everyone else says. That one dates back nearly to when he announced his candidacy in 2015.

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These are just three of the 70 (!) false claims the president has repeated three or more times, according to the Post, and they're dwarfed by the two Big Kahunas. Each of these lies has passed the lips of the president 61 times:

The Affordable Care Act is dying and/or dead.

And from WaPo: "Sixty-one times, he has touted that he secured business investments and job announcements that had been previously announced and could easily be found with a Google search."

Those statements just beat out the claim the U.S. has the highest corporate tax rate (59 times) or the tax plan is the biggest tax cut in American history (55 times). Neither of these are true. The falsehoods, mischaracterizations, and outright lies have become so common as to be a kind of avalanche, burying the body politic in misinformation. The intent is to blur, or erase, the line between fact and fiction, so that anything can be "true" if enough of the president's supporters will believe it. The question is whether we can weather the storm long enough to correct the record.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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