WASHINGTON—During Donald Trump’s first year in office, historians told us there had never been a president who lied so frequently.

It got worse. So much worse.

Trump made 3,135 false claims in the second year in office that ended last Saturday, 8.6 per day. That was almost three times as many as he made in his first year, 1,072 or 2.9 per day.

Article Continued Below

The 15 most dishonest weeks of Trump’s presidency all came in the second year, and 23 of the most dishonest 25 weeks. The 15 most dishonest days of his presidency all came in the second year, and 45 of the most dishonest 50.

The second-year lies were not only incessant but frequently ridiculous, so unsophisticated they could be fact-checked with a single Google search. Or less.

Trump lied that Americans need photo ID to buy cereal.

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.

Article Continued Below

Trump lied that the tariffs he imposed and bragged about do not exist.

Click to expand

He lied 52 times that he was the one who managed to pass the Veterans Choice health care program, which was passed under Barack Obama in 2014. He lied 30 times that his tariffs had prompted U.S. Steel to open six, seven, eight or nine new plants — the claim varied by the day — though the company was making investments in two existing plants.

The actual investments could have made for an effective boast. But Trump is Trump, and there is rarely an accurate boast he doesn’t think could be improved with some inaccuracy.

“He can’t tell the truth even when the truth is in his favour,” said Rick Tyler, an MSNBC political analyst and former spokesperson for Republicans Ted Cruz and Newt Gingrich, who describes Trump’s lying as “pathological.”

“There’s nobody who’s lied like Donald Trump. He lies every day, all day long. To fabricate is part of his nature,” said Rice University presidential historian Douglas Brinkley.

The midterm election campaign was a fusillade of lying unlike any we have seen before. His worst week ever, with 240 false claims, was the week that included the last three days of the campaign. His second-worst week ever? The week before that, with 173.

Click to expand

Trump is never more dishonest than when improvising in front of his supporters, and a primary factor in the amount of lying Trump does is the number of campaign rallies he holds. Of the 10 most dishonest single events of his presidency, nine were campaign rallies in 2018.

Article Continued Below

He lied more in the second year partly because he talked more: he averaged about 25,000 spoken words per week in weeks that began in the second year, up from about 15,000 in the first year, according to the tracking website Factba.se. But, as we showed in the summer, he also got much more dishonest per word.

One big difference between the first year and the second was what Trump was lying about.

Trump made 88 false claims about immigration in the first year, fewer than he made about the economy (159), the 2016 election (105), taxes (103), health care (100), the media (99), and Obama (93).

In the second year, he made immigration the centrepiece of the midterm campaign and then his government shutdown — and, naturally, lied about the subject incessantly, with 584 false claims. He made nearly twice as many false claims in the second year about his proposed border wall, 189, than he did about the entire subject of immigration in the first year.

The economy, his No. 1 subject of dishonesty in the first year, was No. 2 in the second year, though with more than three times as many false claims (554 to 159). As Trump attempted to negotiate trade agreements with several major countries, trade catapulted up the list from tenth in the first year, with 78, to third in the second year, with 472.

Click to expand

But is it working?

Other than the occasional gripe about how fact-checkers are too nitpicky, Trump has been uniquely unresponsive to corrections of his lies. His relentlessness causes Americans who don’t like him to despair, worried that the country’s apparent inability to stop the deception suggests it must be succeeding.

But Trump’s second-year struggles suggested it is not working at all with the people who will determine his political future.

Two of his biggest lies — his denial of involvement in the hush-money payment he funded to porn performer Stormy Daniels, and his denial of campaign-period business dealings with Russia — were exposed by prosecutors and his former lawyer Michael Cohen. His lies about Obamacare did not help him persuade enough senators from his own party to repeal the law.

A majority of voters weren’t buying the lying, either. His fabulism about immigration did not stop Democrats from convincingly winning the midterms. And it has not helped him sell the shutdown, which voters overwhelmingly say should be ended whether or not he gets a border wall, or the wall itself, which a majority of voters continues to find unnecessary.

Though Trump keeps insisting the state of the southern border is a chief national security concern, Brinkley noted, “He just can’t seem to convince 50 per cent of the country that that is true.”

“It’s very hard to govern with 35 per cent,” he said.

About a third of voters continue to tell pollsters that they think Trump is honest and trustworthy. Amanda Carpenter, a CNN commentator and former Cruz aide who wrote a book about Trump’s lying, said Trump can sometimes trick people by telling lies with “so much confidence and bravado” that they think “maybe there’s something to it.”

Carpenter said, though, that even the Republican base overwhelmingly knows he is not a truthful person. Some of them are willing to overlook the lies, she said, because they became convinced long before Trump that Democrats are “the Devil.”

“Once you get into that mindset,” Carpenter said, “you’ll go along with almost anything.”

For the foreseeable future, there is probably no convincing these loyalists. But Trump is in big trouble because he hasn’t been truthful enough to earn the faith of anyone else.

Trump speaks at the most-dishonest single event of his presidency: a campaign rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. on Aug. 2, 2018. He made 36 false claims. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

Some lowlights from Trump’s second-year dishonesty

Feb. 22, 2018: Trump calls CNN “fake news” for “saying I want teachers to have guns. I don’t want teachers to have guns.” He then says that he wants some teachers to have guns: “Certain highly adept people, people that understand weaponry, guns.”

April 5: Asked if he knew about the $130,000 hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels, Trump says “no.” Asked if he knew where lawyer Michael Cohen got the money, Trump says “no.” Trump is later forced to admit he was the one who reimbursed Cohen for the payment.

May 26: Trump urges people to “put pressure on the Democrats to end the horrible law that separates children from there (sic) parents.” There was no such law. Family separation was Trump’s own policy, which Democrats already wanted to end.

June 20: Trump says that Republicans “applauded and laughed loudly” when he insulted congressman Mark Sanford at a party meeting. Three Republicans at the meeting told the Washington Post that nobody responded that way. “There was absolutely no applause,” said Rep. Raul R. Labrador. “Silence,” said Rep. Mark Amodei.

July 12: Trump boasts to a British paper that he predicted Brexit when he was in Scotland “the day before the Brexit vote.” He was not in Scotland until the day after the vote.

Aug. 5: Trump tweets that “California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse” by the state’s policy of diverting water into the Pacific Ocean. California firefighters reported that they do not have a water problem. Water experts noted that the water naturally flows into the Pacific Ocean.

Oct. 1: At a campaign rally in Tennessee, Trump boasts that there were “45,000 people” stuck outside of his previous campaign rally in Springfield, Mo. A Springfield spokesperson later said that just “1,000 or so” people were unable to get in.

Oct. 4: Trump says of Republicans: “We will always protect Americans with pre-existing conditions. We’re going to take care of them. Some of the Democrats have been talking about ending pre-existing conditions.” The truth was the precise opposite. Republicans had made an extensive effort to scrap or weaken Obamacare’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions; no prominent Democrat was talking about doing so.

Oct. 23: Trump boasts about his tariffs to the Wall Street Journal — then, when pressed about their negative consequences, says they don’t exist. “I didn’t put tariffs,” he says. “Where do we have tariffs? We don’t have tariffs anywhere.”

Dec. 25: On Christmas, Trump makes five consecutive false claims to the media, going 317 words without saying anything true.

Jan. 19, 2019: On the last day of his second year, Trump says “mainstream media has truly lost its credibility” … then lies that “the New York Times apologized after the election for their bad coverage and their faulty coverage,” which never happened.

If Trump is a serial liar, why call them 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.