WASHINGTON—Donald Trump falsely accused his opponent of debate cheating and falsely alleged voting fraud and falsely described hacked emails and falsely recited polling data.

Then he attacked the people who point out his false claims.

The Republican presidential candidate has spent much of the campaign bashing the media. On Tuesday, during a frequently dishonest speech at an airport in Sanford, Fla., he singled out a specific group of journalists as “crooked as hell”: fact-checkers.

“These fact-checkers, they’ll check facts with me and I’m like, like, 99-per-cent right, and they’ll say, ‘And therefore he lied,’ ” he said. He concluded: “Oh boy, these people are bad. What a group of people we have. What a group of dishonest scum we have, I’m telling you.”

Trump’s serial untruthfulness has spawned a boom in election fact-checking. Attempting to capture the unprecedented frequency of his inaccuracy, we of the Star have produced a near-daily list of Trump falsehoods since mid-September.

On Monday, the day before his brief rant, we counted 37 false claims from him. That tied the record he set at the third and final presidential debate, which he claimed every poll showed him winning, which was, of course, not at all true.

There are grains of truth in some of his false claims. Contrary to his suggestion, though, most are flat wrong.

On Monday, he said twice that Hillary Clinton’s deletion of emails was “such an expensive process,” though her team used a free software program. He said “nobody” has asked her running mate, Tim Kaine, about comments her aides made about Catholics in hacked emails, though Kaine has been asked on national television. He bragged, for at least the second time, that he had won 42 states in the Republican primary, though it was 36 states.

He added, at one point, that his Democratic opponent “lies more than any human being.” Our fact-checks have shown that there is at least one human who lies much more than her. In the three debates, for which we fact-checked all of their statements, Trump said 104 false things, Clinton 13.

Trump made another unforced accuracy error on Tuesday as he tried to capitalize on Monday’s announcement that the average Obamacare health-insurance benchmark premium will rise 25 per cent on the federal marketplace.

Speaking at his Doral resort in Florida, Trump said, “All of my employees are having a tremendous problem with Obamacare.” This would mean Trump does not offer them health insurance. When asked if his employees were indeed using Obamacare, he said, “Some of them are, but most of them no.”

At the rally in Sanford, Trump vowed to “drain the swamp” in Washington and maintained his insistence that the election is “rigged.” He also called journalists "a bunch of phony low-lifes” and insisted he was going to shock observers with a victory as he said Britain’s “Brexit” vote did.

“There’s going to be a lot of Brexit happening. A lot of Brexit,” he said.

But the difference in their Wednesday schedules told the story of a race that has grown lopsided. Clinton will campaign in critical Florida, Kaine in critical Pennsylvania. Before Trump holds a rally in North Carolina, he will leave the campaign trail to promote his new hotel in Washington, D.C., home of three electoral votes, while his running mate, Mike Pence, will be in deeply conservative Utah, where Trump has managed to fall into a near-tie.

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Trump’s rhetoric, conspiratorial all campaign, has turned even darker as his chances have dimmed. On Monday, he railed against unnamed puppetmasters he suggested are pulling the strings of everything from the media to the justice system to the border.

“They can wield absolute power over your life, your economy and your country and benefit big-time by it. They control what you hear and what you don’t hear, what is covered, how it’s covered, even if it’s covered at all … they can ship your jobs all over the world, let drugs pour in,” he said.

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