{"id":911569,"date":"2026-09-27T12:20:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-27T12:20:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/911569\/"},"modified":"2026-09-27T12:20:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-27T12:20:12","slug":"i-started-fact-checking-trump-10-years-ago-here-are-15-things-ive-learned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/911569\/","title":{"rendered":"I started fact-checking Trump 10 years ago. Here are 15 things I\u2019ve learned"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n Ten years ago this month, in my old job as Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star, I started<\/a> what I believed would be a quick little side project: fact-checking underdog presidential candidate Donald Trump, who was telling a remarkable number of lies but was rarely being corrected. Like a lot of people, I thought Trump would lose the 2016 election.\n <\/p>\n

\n I was very wrong. And Trump continued to be very wrong, about a dizzying variety of subjects, for the next decade.\n <\/p>\n

\n His relentless dishonesty has become a central feature of US and world politics. Voters and members of Congress, allies and adversaries, CEOs and investors alike have had to try to figure out how to read a man whose words are so frequently not true.\n <\/p>\n

\n How frequently? Two months before Election Day in 2020, I had to abandon<\/a> my four-year-old project of fact-checking each and every Trump statement. He was telling so many campaign lies that I\u2019d become physically unable to look into all of them while living something loosely resembling a healthy life. By then, I\u2019d recorded more than 8,500 false claims since September 2016.\n <\/p>\n

\"Daniel<\/p>\n

\n I took a brief break from Trump-checking when he left office in 2021, replaced by a Democratic president with his own accuracy problems<\/a> but nowhere near the volume or variety of Trump\u2019s falsehoods. And then, less than two years later, Trump was back at the top of the news. I counted<\/a> more than 20 false or misleading claims in his 2022 speech launching his third presidential campaign. He has not gotten any more factual since.\n <\/p>\n

\n Since I joined CNN as a fact-check reporter in 2019, I\u2019ve devoted most of my reporting time to the nuts-and-bolts work of separating fact from fiction. But spending hundreds of hours immersed in Trump\u2019s rhetoric has given me some insights and personal opinions about the nature of his lying, how it is received by the public and how it is covered by the media.\n <\/p>\n

\n Ten years in, here are 15 thoughts.\n <\/p>\n

\n Joe Biden sometimes lied, JD Vance sometimes lies, Republicans and Democrats in Congress sometimes lie, Cabinet secretaries notably including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sometimes lie; Washington is not the nation\u2019s capital of straight shooting. But it\u2019s abundantly clear that there is no public official in Washington who lies like Trump \u2013 not as constantly, not as obviously, not about as many topics. I\u2019ve heard people dismiss Trump\u2019s mendacity with a shrugging \u201cthey all lie,\u201d but we are witnessing a rare, very possibly once-in-a-lifetime political liar.\n <\/p>\n

\n Trump\u2019s most concerted lying sprees have come in response to political difficulties: the 2018 midterms<\/a> in which his party was flailing, the 2019 Ukraine scandal<\/a> that led to his first impeachment, the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic<\/a> that was harming his political prospects and the 2020 election he lost<\/a>. When Trump gets in trouble, he ramps up the dishonesty \u2013 even in the cases where dishonesty created some of the trouble in the first place.\n <\/p>\n

\n A lot of people expect politicians to try to lie their way out of a career-threatening jam or lie to make their signature policies look better. The subjects Trump has lied about include a nonexistent phone call<\/a> he claimed to have received from the Boy Scouts, a nonexistent Michigan \u201cMan of the Year\u201d award<\/a> he claimed to have received years ago, and whether there were any empty seats in venues in which seats were visibly empty<\/a>. None of these things are important in the slightest, but Trump\u2019s brain has seen fit to make up a story about them. It\u2019s a special trait.\n <\/p>\n

\n People sometimes ask how I can debunk Trump lies immediately after he utters them. I don\u2019t have any magic tricks. My (non-)secret is that he says the same untrue things again and again. The first time, it might take a while to research; by the 10th or 100th time, I can recite the debunking half-asleep \u2013 and there actually is<\/a> a 100th time for some of the lies.\n <\/p>\n

\n Like a bad poker player, Trump has tells<\/a> that indicate he is likely lying. If he delivers a story featuring an unnamed person calling him \u201csir,\u201d it\u2019s often fiction<\/a>. So are many of his stories<\/a> about burly working-class men crying in his presence and a good portion of his stories<\/a> involving one of his critics supposedly having come to him begging. What do these colorful but dubious tales have in common? They position him as a dominant figure to whom others \u2013 even large dudes \u2013 genuflect.\n <\/p>\n

\n Poll numbers<\/a>, inflation numbers<\/a>, investment numbers<\/a>, gas-price numbers<\/a>, foreign policy<\/a> numbers<\/a>, crowd-size numbers<\/a>, virtually every other kind of number \u2013 a staggering percentage of the figures Trump uses are incorrect. Even when an accurate statistic would make him look good, the businessman who used to inflate his reality show ratings<\/a> and the size of his buildings<\/a> tends to choose<\/a> an inaccurate statistic that would make him look a little better. If \u201csir\u201d is one of the best indications he is not telling the truth, so is him simply using a figure, any figure.\n <\/p>\n

\n Trump has concocted hundreds of lies for his own advantage. But many of the laughable conspiracy theories he has promoted were borrowed from other people, and he<\/a> often<\/a> appears<\/a> to truly believe them. That might be worse, not better. The most powerful person in the world, with access to endless expertise upon request, is not only a fabulist but a frequent dupe for other fabulists.\n <\/p>\n

\n Unless you count blocking me on Twitter<\/a> in 2017, Trump has never publicly acknowledged my existence. But he has sometimes acknowledged he\u2019s aware of fact checks \u2013 while simultaneously sticking with the lies those fact checks corrected, evidently shameless about having had to be corrected.\n <\/p>\n

\n For example, Trump has<\/a> repeatedly<\/a> noted<\/a> that people have pointed out his claim that Biden presided over the very highest inflation in US history as incorrect. But then Trump has immediately gone on to repeat the very-highest-ever claim once more, insisting he still believes it. \u201cSome people will correct me because they always love to correct me, even though I\u2019m right about everything,\u201d he said<\/a>, piling another lie on top of the initial one, during a December rendition of the routine.\n <\/p>\n

\n During Trump\u2019s first term, White House aides would rarely respond to reporters\u2019 questions about his lies; after all, it\u2019s hard to defend the indefensible. But now he has surrounded himself with people willing to try. During his second term, official spokespeople regularly declare him \u201cright\u201d<\/a> about things he is demonstrably wrong about. In a Republican ecosystem currently dominated by Trump loyalists, it\u2019s far from career-ending to shred your credibility with the mainstream media in service of the boss.\n <\/p>\n

The mainstream media doesn\u2019t handle Trump\u2019s lying well enough<\/p>\n

\n Pro-Trump media entities have shown embarrassingly little interest in addressing his lies. But more neutral outlets have regularly failed, too. On the last full day of Trump\u2019s first presidency in 2021, I wrote<\/a>, \u201cToo often, coverage of flagrantly dishonest Trump speeches still mentioned the dishonesty in passing or not at all. Too often, coverage still quoted the president\u2019s lies without explaining that they were wrong.\u201d More than five years later, these problems persist.\n <\/p>\n

\n There are various reasons for that, including reflexive adherence to old habits, a Trump-driven deluge of breaking news and the diminished number<\/a> of employed reporters. (CNN is one of very few outlets that has a full-time political fact-checker.) One of the key explanations, though, is one I wrote about back in 2017<\/a>: \u201cTrump is a human version of computer hackers\u2019 denial-of-service attacks, flooding systems with more disinformation than they are designed to handle.\u201d If a politician tells one blatant lie, it\u2019s likely to get heavy coverage; if a politician tells blatant lies every week for years, it\u2019s likely that most outlets will cease viewing them as news and that the majority will be treated as background noise.\n <\/p>\n

\n In other words, the media strategy that former Trump White House official Steve Bannon memorably described<\/a> in 2018 \u2013 \u201cflood the zone with sh*t\u201d \u2013 has proved effective in getting lots of falsehoods into the public discourse virtually unchallenged.\n <\/p>\n

\n When I give speeches about my work reporting on Trump\u2019s lies, one of the most common questions I get from the audience is some variation of, \u201cThank you, but it\u2019s clear that nobody cares, right?\u201d I argue that this is false, too. It\u2019s clear that millions of Americans either don\u2019t believe debunkings from mainstream outlets or aren\u2019t interested in them, but it\u2019s also clear that millions of Americans want to know when and how the president is trying to deceive them.\n <\/p>\n

\n Polls spanning Trump\u2019s entire career have<\/a> found<\/a> that somewhere around twice as many Americans do not think he is honest and trustworthy as think he is honest and trustworthy. He\u2019s won two presidential elections, of course, but it\u2019s not like he\u2019s ever convinced the entire population to stop caring about whether he is telling the truth.\n <\/p>\n

\n Facts would matter even if only a few people were seeking them out. Fortunately, it\u2019s far more than a few.\n <\/p>\n

\n One of my most eye-opening journalistic experiences was a 2017 reporting trip<\/a> to two Trump-friendly communities in Ohio. Over and over, I heard the president\u2019s supporters say not merely that they didn\u2019t mind his lying but that they actively liked it \u2013 because it agitated the establishment they had come to despise. (\u201cWe\u2019ve had so much crap in Washington for years, and now we have someone shaking \u2019em up really good,\u201d one man told me with delight.) I know that many Trump supporters often don\u2019t know he\u2019s lying or believe his policy stances outweigh the dishonesty. But I\u2019ve also come to understand that there is a pro-dishonesty constituency within his base, at least when that dishonesty is perceived to target the \u201cright\u201d people.\n <\/p>\n

\n I observed this phenomenon with the first frequent political liar<\/a> I covered, the bellicose former Toronto mayor Rob Ford. A politician who gives the impression that they authentically speak their mind is likely to be seen by many as honest even if a high proportion of their actual words are not true. Trump has always done badly in honesty polling, but his insult-heavy, damn-the-teleprompters style has also helped convince a segment of the populace that he is not only reasonably truthful but especially truthful.\n <\/p>\n

\n When Trump lies about a military deal with South Korea<\/a> or Canada\u2019s agricultural policies<\/a> or the actions of some Democrat<\/a> somewhere, the average voter may not know or much care that he is wildly inaccurate. When he lies that<\/a> every price is lower than when he took office, or that<\/a> almost every price is falling \u201crapidly,\u201d even his most fervent supporters can see with their own eyes that he\u2019s trying to trick them. I suspect that his disastrous present polling<\/a> on the cost of living, and generally poor approval ratings<\/a>, are connected not only to inflation itself but also his decision to aggressively deny it exists.\n <\/p>\n

\n Some of Trump\u2019s lies are so bizarre or trivial that I can\u2019t help but laugh. On the whole, though, his lies have been deeply harmful to the country. People died because of the Capitol riot prompted by his lies about the 2020 election. His lies downplaying Covid-19 almost certainly led to deaths<\/a>, too. Specific people targeted by his lies, including journalists<\/a>, judges<\/a> and election workers<\/a>, have faced threats and harassment. His lies have worsened innumerable public debates around critical policy issues. And American democracy itself is worse off<\/a> for all the lying, too.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ten years ago this month, in my old job as Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star, I started…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":911570,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-911569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=911569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911569\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/911570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=911569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=911569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=911569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}