WASHINGTON—U.S. President Donald Trump made 25 false claims last week. Nine of them came during the public portion of his meetings with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. Nine of them came on Twitter.

Trump also made a claim that highlights how he sometimes bends the facts for his own purposes even when he is not saying something that is definitively false.

During a speech to the families of police officers who died on the job, Trump told the story of Rogelio Martinez, a Border Patrol agent who died in 2017.

Trump noted that Martinez “bravely confronted the cartels, the smugglers, the human traffickers, the gangs that threaten our communities.” And then, right after that, he said, “One night, last November, Agent Martinez died in the line of duty. It was horrific. It was violent.”

Trump was clearly suggesting that Martinez was murdered by a violent criminal. But that does not appear to be the case. The FBI announced in February that it had found no evidence Martinez was attacked. In an internal memo that month, then-acting U.S. Customs and Border Protection chief Kevin McAleenan told his staff that he believed Martinez “fell into a nine-foot-deep culvert,” the Washington Post reported.

We cannot call Trump’s claim false: though it appears likely false, there is no conclusive proof either way. Still, it’s worth noting.

Trump is now up to 1,591 false claims for the first 486 days of his presidency, an average of 3.3 per day.

If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of “false claims,” not lies? The 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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