It's no longer groundbreaking or brave to say that President Trump lies. You simply cannot say false things as often as Trump does without sometimes doing it knowingly and on purpose. There is evidence supporting the argument that Trump does not actually believe in the concept of truth in the public discourse. He believes the truth, in that context, is whatever enough people will believe—whether it's about Uranium One or the history of anything—so that he's pretty much free to say whatever he wants, so long as he says it convincingly.

We have new evidence of this today, with The Washington Post's investigation of the president's record telling the truth over the 298 days since he entered the White House. What they found was astonishing.

In that 298-day period, the president has made 1,628 false or misleading claims.

The president is on track to make 1,999 false or misleading claims by the time he reaches the one-year mark in office.

The moment WaPo’s lie-tracking began. Getty Images

The president often repeats the same false claims: He's said 60 times that Obamacare is dying or "essentially dead." Not true, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. 55 times, he has claimed credit for "business investments and job announcements" that had nothing to do with him. Trump has claimed on 40 occasions that the Republican tax plan will be the biggest tax cut in history. It would not—it would be the eighth-biggest. 50 times, he's claimed companies in the U.S. pay the highest corporate taxes. Again, just not true.



In 298 days, the president has made 1,628 false or misleading claims.

WaPo also tracked a couple of glaring economic flip-flops: Trump has celebrated the soaring stock market 57 times since his inauguration. That's after he said it was a bubble set to burst during the campaign, when President Obama was still in office. So it wasn't actually a bubble? During the campaign, Trump said the Labor Department reports that showed sub-five-percent unemployment under Obama were fabricated, and the unemployment rate was really 42 percent. On 33 occasions since becoming president, he has hailed those same reports as evidence of the lowest unemployment in 17 years. So the rate wasn't actually fabricated?



The question, at this point, is whether the American public still cares that the president has no regard for the concept of truth. So far, he has survived in large part thanks to a conservative information ecosystem that has proved largely impenetrable to negative information about him. While bending reality to fit your desired narrative is an effective campaign tactic, as a governing philosophy, it has its drawbacks. After all, it's difficult to deal with the world's problems—or your own—if you don't acknowledge they exist.

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.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io