Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President’s Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies

President Trump made 16,241 “false or misleading” statements between taking office on Jan. 20, 2017, and Jan. 20, 2020, according to the staff of the Washington Post’s Fact Checker. In this comprehensive yet stultifying survey, Fact Checker editor Glenn Kessler and reporters Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly document Trump’s “most egregious and important false claims” (Mexico will pay for the border wall), as well as more obscure distortions (he negotiated peace between Ethiopia and Eritrea), explain why they’re off-base, and look for patterns to understand why and how he twists the truth and how it’s affected his presidency. The authors also discuss the difficulties of applying the Fact Checker’s “Pinocchio scale” (one Pinocchio for “selective telling of the truth”; four for “a whopper”), which was created in 2007 to evaluate specific claims made in order to advance policy agendas, to a president whose supporters seem unperturbed by his “constant stream” of falsehoods and exaggerations. Though illustrated with insightful sidebars and graphs, the book’s analysis doesn’t go far beyond noting that Trump’s mendacity has roots in his real estate and entertainment careers, and is not the liability it would be for other politicians. Readers will be more exhausted than enlightened. (June)