Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 06:40 pm
Tough going if you’re a fact checker this year, but luckily there’s one shining beacon of falsehoods so big and so bright as to stand out from the rest. Bonus points because this one has not just one or two outright lies, but out of 77 statements checked, 76 of them were found to be mostly false to false to pants on fire lies.
You know who it is. It’s Republican presidential candidate front-runner Donald Trump.
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Yes, PolitiFact has chosen the “many campaign misstatements” of Donald Trump as the Lie of the Year because they could not settle on which of his lies was the biggest. “To the candidate who says he’s all about winning, PolitiFact designates the many campaign misstatements of Donald Trump as our 2015 Lie of the Year.”
Merry Christmas, Mr. Trump.
Watch here:
Among the big lies… Trump claiming he watched thousands and thousands of people cheering in New Jersey upon the fall of the World Trade Center, Trump claiming the Mexican government sends “the bad ones” over here, Trump claiming on Twitter “Whites killed by whites — 16%. Whites killed by blacks — 81%.”
But then there was also just the announcement speech (my bold), “When Trump declared his candidacy on June 16, 2015, PolitiFact looked at five statements from his announcement speech. All of them were inaccurate.”
Then Trump started talking about foreign policy. False. Trump denied all of the nasty things he’s said about women and claimed Megyn Kelly accused him of saying things he didn’t say. Also not true. Trump claimed we were the most highly taxed nation when he made the mistake of opening his mouth regarding economic policies. Also false.
Facts don’t stop the Real Donald Trump, though, and this is probably what gets fact checkers up in arms about him. Once fact-checked, Trump just rides confidently over the facts and stays on his course of inaccuracies. No facts? No problem! He doesn’t even try to justify his lies. Trump is making up his own reality and if you don’t like it, hey, that’s why his pal Putin killing journalists isn’t so bad.
PolitiFact says Trump has “an unprecedented record on the Truth-O-Meter” and that is why he earned Lie of the Year.
The problem is that Republican primary voters don’t seem to care one bit that their candidate is so divorced from reality. They just want the comfort food of Trump’s bigotry and anger. This is who the Republican Party has become, as even Senator Lindsey Graham said today as he quit the Republican race that his wing of the party is gone. Gone, replaced with the Sarah Palin wing.
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Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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