WASHINGTON—Donald Trump is almost exclusively talking about immigration during the ongoing government shutdown. Very little of what he is saying is true.

Trump made 52 false claims last week as he pressed his case for a wall on the border with Mexico. Thirty-four of them were about immigration — including 14 on his extremely dishonest Thursday visit to a Texas border city, plus five more to reporters as he departed for that trip.

Either out of malice or ignorance, he told wildly inaccurate tales about human trafficking at the border. He lied about Democrats’ position and the history of the wall debate. He even lied, bizarrely and obviously, about his own travel — declaring, two days after the trip to Texas, that he had not left the White House “in months.”

And he introduced a notable new lie: a claim that he had never said, while promising that Mexico would pay for the wall, that Mexico would actually write out a cheque, just that Mexico would effectively pay in some indirect form. In fact, his campaign had explicitly promised that Mexico would “make a one-time payment of $5-10 billion.” And Trump had said a literal cheque was a possibility: “They may even write us a cheque by the time they see what happens. They may,” he told Fox News host Sean Hannity in April 2016.

“They may even write us a cheque by the time they see what happens. They may,” he told Fox News host Sean Hannity in April 2016.

Trump is now up to 4,167 false claims for the first 724 days of his presidency, an average of 5.8 per day.

A note about a previous fact-check: In making the case for his proposed border wall, Trump has repeatedly claimed that Israel’s wall is 100 per cent or 99.9 per cent successful. We have called this false, since journalists have extensively documented how Palestinians are able to circumvent Israel’s West Bank barrier. But a fellow journalist pointed out that Trump might actually have been referring to Israel’s barrier on its border with Egypt, which experts say may indeed have almost entirely stopped illegal immigration from there. To be safe, we have deleted the eight instances of that statement from our false-claims database.

Now you can stay on top of Donald Trump’s lies and false claims like never before with Daniel Dale’s new Trumpcheck newsletter. Sign up here.

If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of “false claims,” not lies? You can read our detailed explanation here. The short answer is that we can’t be sure that each and every one was intentional. In some cases, he may have been confused or ignorant. What we know, objectively, is that he was not telling the truth.

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