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Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President's Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies
A NATIONAL BESTSELLERIn perilous times, facts, expertise, and truth are indispensable. President Trump’s flagrant disregard for the truth and his self-aggrandizing exaggerations, specious misstatements, and bald-faced lies have been rigorously documented and debunked since the first day of his presidency by The Washington Post’s Fact Checker staff.Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth is based on the only comprehensive compilation and analysis of the more than 16,000 fallacious statements that Trump has uttered since the day of his inauguration. He has repeated many of his most outrageous claims dozens or even hundreds of times as he has sought to bend reality to his political fantasy and personal whim.Drawing on Trump’s tweets, press conferences, political rallies, and TV appearances, The Washington Post identifies his most frequently used misstatements, biggest whoppers, and most dangerous deceptions. This book unpacks his errant statements about the economy, immigration, the impeachment hearings, foreign policy, and, of critical concern now, the coronavirus crisis as it unfolded.Fascinating, startling, and even grimly funny, Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth by The Washington Post is the essential, authoritative record of Trump’s shocking disregard for facts.
381 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 2, 2020
488 people are currently reading
402 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 69 reviews
July 9, 2020
Mostly old news if one has been following the news. This is a compendium of the most weighty of President Trump's prevarications and distortions. It is well documented and researched. I hope we do not have any future presidents or important public servants who follow this modus operandi.
September 18, 2024
I have once again decided to embark on a mission to read a number of books on subjects that will be of great importance to the upcoming 2024 US Presidential Election. This was a great success as I prepared for 2020, with an outcome at the polls (and antics by both candidates up to Inauguration Day) that only a fiction writer might have come up with at the time! Many of these will focus on actors and events intricately involved in the US political system over the last few years, in hopes that I can understand them better and, perhaps, educate others with the power to cast a ballot. I am, as always, open to serious recommendations from anyone who has a book I might like to include in the process.
With the events of July 21, 2024, when Joe Biden chose not to seek re-election, the challenge has become harder to properly reflect the Democratic side. I will do the best I can to properly prepare and offer up books that can explore the Biden Administration, as well as whomever takes the helm into November.
This is Book #31 in my 2024 US Election Preparation Challenge.
It ought to surprise no one that Donald Trump has treated the truth like many of the women in his life; used when needed and tossed aside when it no longer suits him. While this may be true, the extent to which the truth is elusive to the 45th president is staggering. In this book of compiled statements by Donald J, Trump, the Fact Checking Staff of the Washington Post pulls together a number of them to show just how outlandish and contradictory they have been over the years. While many will not want to see the truth in print, this book seeks not only to offer the statements, but backs up what actually happened and how Trump chose to massage things for his own good. A sobering book that pulls few punches while trying to bring to light the bombastic man who feels that the truth is but a thorn in his side when trying to rally the troops. Well worth the invested time and effort.
While only looking at the first three years he was in office, the Washington Post’s analysis of Trump’s statements brought forth over 16,000 statements it could call lies or lacking a significant truth. This is a staggering number and offers the reader a baseline to understand just how little telling the actual story ever mattered to the man who feels he is above journalistic reporting. Trump has always used events in his favour and has spun truths out of nothing to suit him, or dismiss it when things no longer lean in that direction. That Trump does not care is perhaps more troubling than that he spews forth nonsense with every breath he takes.
As the Fact Checking Staff compiled these statements over the Trump Administration, they tried to rank them from minor gaffes (a single Pinocchio) to the larger lies that subsume the daily narrative (four Pinocchios). However, there are times that these ‘lying boy’ rankings are not enough, forcing a Golden and Ultimate ranking to come off the shelf and into the analytical process. That many are either blind or indifferent to these lies is shocking in an era when social media can send news out in the blink of an eye, though it is clear that massaging truth is not only the role held by politician figures. Still, one would hope that with a finger on the pulse readily available, the people would demand more of their leaders.
The book divides the statements and lies into multiple themes, which will permit the reader to better catalogue the misconceptions. The team explores Trump’s views on the economy, trade, immigration, foreign relations, and even domestic policy, using his mounting braggadocio to show how out of touch he is while puffing up his chest. Not only does the team offer the statements and their date context, but tries to provide real-world context about what happened or the quoted statement made by the person being discussed in Trump’s one-liners. The parallel statements sobers the reader a little more, leaving them to shake their heads as they stifle a laugh at the absurdity of the entire process.
One would be remiss in thinking that only Trump lies. I do not contend that America elected a man who lies, an anomaly never seen in the political world. But it is the depth and repetitiveness of these falsehoods, even when plainly obvious, that is troubling and truly worrisome. Perhaps it is worse that many lap it up and fall for the deceptive statements, treating them with more reverence than books of the Bible or sections of the US Constitution. They say that ignorance is bliss, but there must be a limit to the level of complete cluelessness those given a ballot can be allowed. Then again, perhaps there is simply a large swath of people whose spirit animal is the ostrich.
A book of this nature takes not only time and dedication, but also significant patience. Wading through statements in order to pull the actual events out to show the public is not something one can do on a coffee break or during downtime at home. It is a full-time job by an entire team. That the Washington Post has done this and is encouraged by its readers to keep doing do is worthy of applause. Well-documented chapters keep the reader enthused and educated. That the book reads with ease helps make the point with all readers and does not turn this exercise into something academic. The Fact Checking Team does well to provide concrete examples and explanations to give needed context as they sift through the piles of falsehoods and half-truths. Trump has not slowed his rhetoric going into 2024, which makes watching his circus all the more entertaining, so long as it remains only a sideshow and America does not return a clown to the most powerful position in the world’s political order.
Kudos, Washington Post Fact Checker Staff—aka Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo, and Meg Kelly—for enlightening me on just how silly one man can be as he leads many over the cliff.
Love/hate the review? An ever-growing collection of others appears at:
http://pecheyponderings.wordpress.com/
With the events of July 21, 2024, when Joe Biden chose not to seek re-election, the challenge has become harder to properly reflect the Democratic side. I will do the best I can to properly prepare and offer up books that can explore the Biden Administration, as well as whomever takes the helm into November.
This is Book #31 in my 2024 US Election Preparation Challenge.
It ought to surprise no one that Donald Trump has treated the truth like many of the women in his life; used when needed and tossed aside when it no longer suits him. While this may be true, the extent to which the truth is elusive to the 45th president is staggering. In this book of compiled statements by Donald J, Trump, the Fact Checking Staff of the Washington Post pulls together a number of them to show just how outlandish and contradictory they have been over the years. While many will not want to see the truth in print, this book seeks not only to offer the statements, but backs up what actually happened and how Trump chose to massage things for his own good. A sobering book that pulls few punches while trying to bring to light the bombastic man who feels that the truth is but a thorn in his side when trying to rally the troops. Well worth the invested time and effort.
While only looking at the first three years he was in office, the Washington Post’s analysis of Trump’s statements brought forth over 16,000 statements it could call lies or lacking a significant truth. This is a staggering number and offers the reader a baseline to understand just how little telling the actual story ever mattered to the man who feels he is above journalistic reporting. Trump has always used events in his favour and has spun truths out of nothing to suit him, or dismiss it when things no longer lean in that direction. That Trump does not care is perhaps more troubling than that he spews forth nonsense with every breath he takes.
As the Fact Checking Staff compiled these statements over the Trump Administration, they tried to rank them from minor gaffes (a single Pinocchio) to the larger lies that subsume the daily narrative (four Pinocchios). However, there are times that these ‘lying boy’ rankings are not enough, forcing a Golden and Ultimate ranking to come off the shelf and into the analytical process. That many are either blind or indifferent to these lies is shocking in an era when social media can send news out in the blink of an eye, though it is clear that massaging truth is not only the role held by politician figures. Still, one would hope that with a finger on the pulse readily available, the people would demand more of their leaders.
The book divides the statements and lies into multiple themes, which will permit the reader to better catalogue the misconceptions. The team explores Trump’s views on the economy, trade, immigration, foreign relations, and even domestic policy, using his mounting braggadocio to show how out of touch he is while puffing up his chest. Not only does the team offer the statements and their date context, but tries to provide real-world context about what happened or the quoted statement made by the person being discussed in Trump’s one-liners. The parallel statements sobers the reader a little more, leaving them to shake their heads as they stifle a laugh at the absurdity of the entire process.
One would be remiss in thinking that only Trump lies. I do not contend that America elected a man who lies, an anomaly never seen in the political world. But it is the depth and repetitiveness of these falsehoods, even when plainly obvious, that is troubling and truly worrisome. Perhaps it is worse that many lap it up and fall for the deceptive statements, treating them with more reverence than books of the Bible or sections of the US Constitution. They say that ignorance is bliss, but there must be a limit to the level of complete cluelessness those given a ballot can be allowed. Then again, perhaps there is simply a large swath of people whose spirit animal is the ostrich.
A book of this nature takes not only time and dedication, but also significant patience. Wading through statements in order to pull the actual events out to show the public is not something one can do on a coffee break or during downtime at home. It is a full-time job by an entire team. That the Washington Post has done this and is encouraged by its readers to keep doing do is worthy of applause. Well-documented chapters keep the reader enthused and educated. That the book reads with ease helps make the point with all readers and does not turn this exercise into something academic. The Fact Checking Team does well to provide concrete examples and explanations to give needed context as they sift through the piles of falsehoods and half-truths. Trump has not slowed his rhetoric going into 2024, which makes watching his circus all the more entertaining, so long as it remains only a sideshow and America does not return a clown to the most powerful position in the world’s political order.
Kudos, Washington Post Fact Checker Staff—aka Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo, and Meg Kelly—for enlightening me on just how silly one man can be as he leads many over the cliff.
Love/hate the review? An ever-growing collection of others appears at:
http://pecheyponderings.wordpress.com/
September 25, 2020
"And then there's Donald Trump the most mendacious president in U.S. history. He's almost never expresses regret. He's not known for one big lie just a constant stream of exaggerated, invented, boastful purposely outrageous, spiteful, inconsistent, dubious and false claims. As of Jan. 20, 2020, three years after Trump took the oath of office, the count stood at 16,241."(p.2) OMG, I always know when Trump is lying his lips are moving. This book is a great summary of a man who really does not know how to speak the truth, and twist information around until it becomes lies and supports his opinions and ideas. The book is hilarious as the Washington Post uses pictures of Pinocchio fact tracking his statements and tweets. The worse a lie is the more Pinocchio's it receives. The book does a meticulously fact check on all his statements and tweets for truth and accuracy by backing it up with evidence. Its hard to believe that one person could speak so much BS. I'm sure while this edition was printed he added another few thousand to his repertoire. This is a good read on the world seen through the eyes of a narcissistic human being who continues to shred our constitution to shreds.
September 28, 2025
LIAR,
LIAR,
PANTS ON FIRE.
{{{silence}}}
GO VOTE!
LIAR,
PANTS ON FIRE.
{{{silence}}}
GO VOTE!
August 18, 2020
Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President's Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies by Glenn Kessler
“Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth” is an excellent compilation of the long list of falsehoods disseminated by Trump via tweets, rallies, press conferences and TV appearances brought to you by Glenn Kessler, editor and chief writer and fact checker of the Washington Post. This useful 381-page book includes the following ten chapters: 1. The Biggest Whoppers: “Mexico’s Paying”, 2. Trump on Trump: “I Call It Truthful Hyperbole”, 3. Trump and His Enemies: “I Call Them Animals”, 4. Boasts to the Base: “You’re the Super-Elite!”, 5. The Twitter Presidency: “He Needs to Tweet Like We Need to Eat”, 6. Trump on Immigration: “They’re Bringing Crime”, 7. Trump on Economics and Trade: “The Best Economy Ever!”, 8. Trump on Foreign Policy: “We Fell in Love”, 9. Trump on Impeachment: “A Perfect Phone Call”, and 10. Trump and Coronavirus: “Their New Hoax”.
Positives:
1. A well-written, factual-based book.
2. An interesting topic, a fact checker’s dream, a compilation of Trump’s major falsehoods.
3. Clearly states what this book is all about. “From the start of Trump’s presidency, The Washington Post Fact Checker team has catalogued every false or misleading statement he has made. As of Jan. 20, 2020, three years after Trump took the oath of office, the count stood at 16,241.” “This book is not simply a catalogue of false claims; rather, it is a guide to Trump’s attack on the truth.”
4. The book is catalogued for easy future reference. ““Mexico’s paying for the wall. You know that. You’ll see that. It’s all worked out. Mexico’s paying.” —Jan. 14, 2020 (campaign rally)”
5. Trump’s disastrous mishandling of the coronavirus. “Similarly, Trump’s response to the 2020 coronavirus outbreak was hobbled by his consistently upbeat pronouncements that the United States was safe, even as the virus rapidly spread around the globe. “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China,” he said on Feb. 2. Three weeks later, he said the coronavirus “is very well under control in our country.” The next day, he confidently predicted that the 15 reported cases in the United States at that point “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.””
6. Interesting insights. “Trump speaks at the reading level of a 4th or 5th grader (as measured by the Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level Formula), according to an analysis by FactBa.se, a website that tracks Trump’s statements. That is the lowest grade level of any president since Herbert Hoover.”
7. Scandals revealed. “In September 2019, a whistleblower alleged that Trump pushed his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate his potential 2020 election rival, former vice president Joe Biden—a potential abuse of the presidency for personal gain.”
8. Trump’s racist comments. “When Trump launched his presidential campaign in June 2015, he made a broad-brush accusation against Mexico: “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing… drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.””
9. Trump’s name-calling. “Donald Trump had no rational reason to believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, but Trump persisted with the “birther” lie for years. Ted Cruz’s father played no role in the JFK assassination, but that didn’t steer Trump away from a crackpot conspiracy theory in the National Enquirer. When he became president, Trump referred to African nations as “shithole countries,” to Rep. Adam Schiff as “Adam Schitt” and to his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, as a bumbling “Mr. Magoo.””
10. Lies, lies and more lies. “Republicans lost the House to Democrats in 2018. Defying reality, Trump called it a “very close to complete victory” for his side.”
11. An examination of Trump tweets. “This is the story of the president and his platform of choice. We look at how Trump’s tweets reveal his comfort with contradicting himself, and we offer a chronological survey of the various ways the president counterpunches with his itchy Twitter fingers—digitally shouting out conspiracy theories, railing against investigations, Democrats, former staff and any and all he believes to be “against Trump.””
12. A look into the Mueller report. “Democrats didn’t “illegally fabricate a crime.” Mueller’s report concluded that there was significant evidence that Trump obstructed justice. Mueller said he declined to reach a decision on whether to file obstruction charges against Trump in part because of a Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president and in part because he didn’t want to get in the way of a potential impeachment process in Congress.
13. Debunks many false theories. “The U.S. violent crime rate was cut by nearly half between 1990 and 2013, while the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States more than tripled, rising to 11.2 million, according to the nonpartisan American Immigration Council.”
14. Debunks Trump’s distortions. “The Obama administration actually rejected a plan for family separations, according to Cecilia Muñoz, Obama’s top adviser for immigration. The Trump administration, by contrast, operated a pilot program for family separations in the El Paso area beginning in mid-2017, then expanded it to the entire border in 2018.”
15. Debunks Trump claiming to inherit a bad economy. “Trump often speaks as if he took office in the middle of the Great Recession when in fact he inherited a pretty good economy. The U.S. added more than 250,000 jobs each month in 2014 and 227,000 a month in 2015; it added 193,000 a month in 2016, as Trump barnstormed the country saying the economy was in crisis. In 2017, Trump’s first year in office, monthly job growth slowed to 179,000 per month. It jumped to 223,000 a month in 2018—lower than under Obama in 2014 and 2015—and fell back to 175,000 a month in 2019.”
16. A look into Trump’s foreign policy. ““Iran went in, and they hit us with missiles. Shouldn’t have done that, but they hit us. Fortunately for them, nobody was hurt, nobody was killed. Nothing happened. They landed—and very little damage even, to the base.” —Jan. 9, 2020 (speech).”
17. A look into Trump’s alleged perfect phone call. “On the call, Trump cryptically suggested a link between a Ukrainian investigation of former vice president Joe Biden, Trump’s potential 2020 rival, and favors for Zelensky—a promised White House meeting and delivery of U.S. military aid. Some administration officials listening in on the call were so shocked by Trump’s blunt and threatening language that within weeks, a whistleblower submitted a report to Congress, resulting in an investigation, a vote to impeach Trump and, eventually, his trial and acquittal in the Senate.”
18. The Democrat’s New Hoax. “At one campaign rally, Trump even said that media coverage of the virus’s spread was the Democrats’ “new hoax.””
19. A solid Conclusion chapter. “A hallmark of authoritarian regimes is to call truth into question—except as the regime defines it.”
20. An appendix that examines a typical Trump rally. “Our analysis showed that the truth took a beating. From a grand total of 179 factual statements, we identified 120 that were false, mostly false or unsupported by evidence. That’s 67 percent, or two-thirds of what Trump said.”
Negatives:
1. No visual or supplementary material. Some of the material would have been complemented nicely with graphs or charts but no avail.
2. Redundancy.
In summary, a well-documented list of Trump’s lies and distortions. The Washington Post led by Glenn Kessler did a wonderful job of fact checking Trump’s long laundry list of lies. The book is catalogued for easy reference. The only major negative is the lack of visual material. An excellent resource, I recommend it!
Further suggestions: “Too Much and Never Enough” by Mary L. Trump, “The Room Where It Happened” by John Bolton, “Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever” by Rick Wilson, “Fear” by Bob Woodward, “Fire and Fury” by Michael Wolff, “Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic” by David Frum, “A Higher Loyalty” by James Comey, “Facts and Fears” by James R. Clapper, “How Democracies Die” by Steven Levitsky, “It’s Even Worse Than You Think” by David Cay Johnston, “How the Right Lost Its Mind” by Charles J. Sykes, “One Nation After Trump” by E.J. Dionne Jr., and “Democracy in Chains” by Nancy MacLean.
“Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth” is an excellent compilation of the long list of falsehoods disseminated by Trump via tweets, rallies, press conferences and TV appearances brought to you by Glenn Kessler, editor and chief writer and fact checker of the Washington Post. This useful 381-page book includes the following ten chapters: 1. The Biggest Whoppers: “Mexico’s Paying”, 2. Trump on Trump: “I Call It Truthful Hyperbole”, 3. Trump and His Enemies: “I Call Them Animals”, 4. Boasts to the Base: “You’re the Super-Elite!”, 5. The Twitter Presidency: “He Needs to Tweet Like We Need to Eat”, 6. Trump on Immigration: “They’re Bringing Crime”, 7. Trump on Economics and Trade: “The Best Economy Ever!”, 8. Trump on Foreign Policy: “We Fell in Love”, 9. Trump on Impeachment: “A Perfect Phone Call”, and 10. Trump and Coronavirus: “Their New Hoax”.
Positives:
1. A well-written, factual-based book.
2. An interesting topic, a fact checker’s dream, a compilation of Trump’s major falsehoods.
3. Clearly states what this book is all about. “From the start of Trump’s presidency, The Washington Post Fact Checker team has catalogued every false or misleading statement he has made. As of Jan. 20, 2020, three years after Trump took the oath of office, the count stood at 16,241.” “This book is not simply a catalogue of false claims; rather, it is a guide to Trump’s attack on the truth.”
4. The book is catalogued for easy future reference. ““Mexico’s paying for the wall. You know that. You’ll see that. It’s all worked out. Mexico’s paying.” —Jan. 14, 2020 (campaign rally)”
5. Trump’s disastrous mishandling of the coronavirus. “Similarly, Trump’s response to the 2020 coronavirus outbreak was hobbled by his consistently upbeat pronouncements that the United States was safe, even as the virus rapidly spread around the globe. “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China,” he said on Feb. 2. Three weeks later, he said the coronavirus “is very well under control in our country.” The next day, he confidently predicted that the 15 reported cases in the United States at that point “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.””
6. Interesting insights. “Trump speaks at the reading level of a 4th or 5th grader (as measured by the Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level Formula), according to an analysis by FactBa.se, a website that tracks Trump’s statements. That is the lowest grade level of any president since Herbert Hoover.”
7. Scandals revealed. “In September 2019, a whistleblower alleged that Trump pushed his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate his potential 2020 election rival, former vice president Joe Biden—a potential abuse of the presidency for personal gain.”
8. Trump’s racist comments. “When Trump launched his presidential campaign in June 2015, he made a broad-brush accusation against Mexico: “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing… drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.””
9. Trump’s name-calling. “Donald Trump had no rational reason to believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, but Trump persisted with the “birther” lie for years. Ted Cruz’s father played no role in the JFK assassination, but that didn’t steer Trump away from a crackpot conspiracy theory in the National Enquirer. When he became president, Trump referred to African nations as “shithole countries,” to Rep. Adam Schiff as “Adam Schitt” and to his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, as a bumbling “Mr. Magoo.””
10. Lies, lies and more lies. “Republicans lost the House to Democrats in 2018. Defying reality, Trump called it a “very close to complete victory” for his side.”
11. An examination of Trump tweets. “This is the story of the president and his platform of choice. We look at how Trump’s tweets reveal his comfort with contradicting himself, and we offer a chronological survey of the various ways the president counterpunches with his itchy Twitter fingers—digitally shouting out conspiracy theories, railing against investigations, Democrats, former staff and any and all he believes to be “against Trump.””
12. A look into the Mueller report. “Democrats didn’t “illegally fabricate a crime.” Mueller’s report concluded that there was significant evidence that Trump obstructed justice. Mueller said he declined to reach a decision on whether to file obstruction charges against Trump in part because of a Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president and in part because he didn’t want to get in the way of a potential impeachment process in Congress.
13. Debunks many false theories. “The U.S. violent crime rate was cut by nearly half between 1990 and 2013, while the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States more than tripled, rising to 11.2 million, according to the nonpartisan American Immigration Council.”
14. Debunks Trump’s distortions. “The Obama administration actually rejected a plan for family separations, according to Cecilia Muñoz, Obama’s top adviser for immigration. The Trump administration, by contrast, operated a pilot program for family separations in the El Paso area beginning in mid-2017, then expanded it to the entire border in 2018.”
15. Debunks Trump claiming to inherit a bad economy. “Trump often speaks as if he took office in the middle of the Great Recession when in fact he inherited a pretty good economy. The U.S. added more than 250,000 jobs each month in 2014 and 227,000 a month in 2015; it added 193,000 a month in 2016, as Trump barnstormed the country saying the economy was in crisis. In 2017, Trump’s first year in office, monthly job growth slowed to 179,000 per month. It jumped to 223,000 a month in 2018—lower than under Obama in 2014 and 2015—and fell back to 175,000 a month in 2019.”
16. A look into Trump’s foreign policy. ““Iran went in, and they hit us with missiles. Shouldn’t have done that, but they hit us. Fortunately for them, nobody was hurt, nobody was killed. Nothing happened. They landed—and very little damage even, to the base.” —Jan. 9, 2020 (speech).”
17. A look into Trump’s alleged perfect phone call. “On the call, Trump cryptically suggested a link between a Ukrainian investigation of former vice president Joe Biden, Trump’s potential 2020 rival, and favors for Zelensky—a promised White House meeting and delivery of U.S. military aid. Some administration officials listening in on the call were so shocked by Trump’s blunt and threatening language that within weeks, a whistleblower submitted a report to Congress, resulting in an investigation, a vote to impeach Trump and, eventually, his trial and acquittal in the Senate.”
18. The Democrat’s New Hoax. “At one campaign rally, Trump even said that media coverage of the virus’s spread was the Democrats’ “new hoax.””
19. A solid Conclusion chapter. “A hallmark of authoritarian regimes is to call truth into question—except as the regime defines it.”
20. An appendix that examines a typical Trump rally. “Our analysis showed that the truth took a beating. From a grand total of 179 factual statements, we identified 120 that were false, mostly false or unsupported by evidence. That’s 67 percent, or two-thirds of what Trump said.”
Negatives:
1. No visual or supplementary material. Some of the material would have been complemented nicely with graphs or charts but no avail.
2. Redundancy.
In summary, a well-documented list of Trump’s lies and distortions. The Washington Post led by Glenn Kessler did a wonderful job of fact checking Trump’s long laundry list of lies. The book is catalogued for easy reference. The only major negative is the lack of visual material. An excellent resource, I recommend it!
Further suggestions: “Too Much and Never Enough” by Mary L. Trump, “The Room Where It Happened” by John Bolton, “Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever” by Rick Wilson, “Fear” by Bob Woodward, “Fire and Fury” by Michael Wolff, “Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic” by David Frum, “A Higher Loyalty” by James Comey, “Facts and Fears” by James R. Clapper, “How Democracies Die” by Steven Levitsky, “It’s Even Worse Than You Think” by David Cay Johnston, “How the Right Lost Its Mind” by Charles J. Sykes, “One Nation After Trump” by E.J. Dionne Jr., and “Democracy in Chains” by Nancy MacLean.
December 22, 2020
This is almost 4 stars. After a while you kind of run out of "wow!", due to over-use.
As with David Fahrenhold's Uncovering Trump: The Truth Behind Donald Trump's Charitable Giving, for which he got a Pulitzer, this is exceedingly well-researched, well-arranged, pretty well-written. These are journalists, and that tends to show in the writing style, which is OK, just so you know.
I'm srsly thinking about buying this, but maybe it will come down from $15.
As with Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, wherein T45 has been documented as cheating on many rounds of golf which have been witnessed by people besides his caddy and SecSvc people, this book shows that T45 lies about as often as he twits (tweets?), or makes even a couple of statements, and this is worse when he's in front of a crowd.
The last segment of the book is a paragraph-by-paragraph analysis of one of his late-2020 speeches. The flim-flam, the lies, the puffery, the self-aggrandizement, the character-assassination - it's so very bad, and yet the Magats suck this up and yell encouragement back at him, every damn time.
As with David Fahrenhold's Uncovering Trump: The Truth Behind Donald Trump's Charitable Giving, for which he got a Pulitzer, this is exceedingly well-researched, well-arranged, pretty well-written. These are journalists, and that tends to show in the writing style, which is OK, just so you know.
I'm srsly thinking about buying this, but maybe it will come down from $15.
As with Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, wherein T45 has been documented as cheating on many rounds of golf which have been witnessed by people besides his caddy and SecSvc people, this book shows that T45 lies about as often as he twits (tweets?), or makes even a couple of statements, and this is worse when he's in front of a crowd.
The last segment of the book is a paragraph-by-paragraph analysis of one of his late-2020 speeches. The flim-flam, the lies, the puffery, the self-aggrandizement, the character-assassination - it's so very bad, and yet the Magats suck this up and yell encouragement back at him, every damn time.
February 18, 2021
Every politician lies at some point--this is no big secret. But the rate and ease this Lord of the Lard fibbed his way through the presidency, leading a drone of followers that believed in his falsehoods is staggering.
The worst President in American History.
And one of the worst human beings that ever existed.
Partisan review?
I don't care. Damn him and all his enablers...
The worst President in American History.
And one of the worst human beings that ever existed.
Partisan review?
I don't care. Damn him and all his enablers...
July 22, 2020
My last few months have been days of fear and uncertainty. As my father explained to me about being on a submarine, "You went along for days in a small, hot tube and then you were surrounded by fear. If you made the wrong decision, it was fatal." I've lived a very protected life. Because I'm who I am, I threw away my calm life in my junior year of high school and joined SNCC and CORE. Over the next two years, I helped with non-violent protest of racial inequality and the War in Vietnam. Needless to say, some of the places I found myself were not safe. The protest of the White Hall Induction Center in New York City was the first time I found myself being commanded to do something that would lead to my breaking the law and then being beaten. Those two hours of confrontation were not exhilarating. All of this hugely off the subject digression is to say that I'm tired of Trump and his mishandling of our country. I've been consigned to quarantine in my house for the past five months. Every so often, Liz, or my brother, or my sister, or I have entered dangerous places. And for the past four weeks or so, I've been reading this book and realizing that our president lies all the time.
The book can be read as a reference for conversations with your Trump supporting friends. Each chapter has certain kinds of lies or omissions or deceptions that our president does every day. He's passed over 20,000 lied during his presidency. I buckled down and decided I would finish the book, no matter how daunting.
The final chapter, the epilogue, covers one of President Trump's rallies. Missing are the roars of approval by his supporters, their boos of the media covering the rally, and the sort humorous terror that hangs over every Trump event. I could not finish the chapter. I just couldn't continue through the old standbys he delivers about locking up his opponents or his appeals for more time as president because he has been kept from fulfilling his promises. No one calls, "Where are the pesos that Mexico was supposed to pay for the Wall?" or "Why doesn't Korea stop shooting off missiles if you've made us safer?" I just wanted his rally to be over. And his presidency. I'm tired and scared, a bad combination.
The book can be read as a reference for conversations with your Trump supporting friends. Each chapter has certain kinds of lies or omissions or deceptions that our president does every day. He's passed over 20,000 lied during his presidency. I buckled down and decided I would finish the book, no matter how daunting.
The final chapter, the epilogue, covers one of President Trump's rallies. Missing are the roars of approval by his supporters, their boos of the media covering the rally, and the sort humorous terror that hangs over every Trump event. I could not finish the chapter. I just couldn't continue through the old standbys he delivers about locking up his opponents or his appeals for more time as president because he has been kept from fulfilling his promises. No one calls, "Where are the pesos that Mexico was supposed to pay for the Wall?" or "Why doesn't Korea stop shooting off missiles if you've made us safer?" I just wanted his rally to be over. And his presidency. I'm tired and scared, a bad combination.
April 9, 2021
A book for posterity if there ever was one. If only the truth was the only thing 45 had assaulted.
August 9, 2020
If you don't want to read the whole book, although I did, skip to the appendix and get all the claims and fact checking in a nutshell. I already knew most of what this book has fact-checked, but some of it was new to me. I continue to be appalled that so many people prefer to believe lies and conspiracy theories rather than doing some fact checking and becoming aware of the truth.
Although much of the information was not new to me, seeing it all laid out as it is in this book is very disconcerting. Many presidents have had one lie, one major misstep, that follows them. This “president” has had so many that we tend to forget the earlier, the less egregious ones. Laid out well, and with solid information rather than guessing and innuendos, this book is a good one to read if you really care about this country.
Although much of the information was not new to me, seeing it all laid out as it is in this book is very disconcerting. Many presidents have had one lie, one major misstep, that follows them. This “president” has had so many that we tend to forget the earlier, the less egregious ones. Laid out well, and with solid information rather than guessing and innuendos, this book is a good one to read if you really care about this country.
June 7, 2020
Great
Informative and correct
In-depth
Easy reading
All statements were crossed checked for truth and accuracy
Excellent research
Recommend reading for everyone
Thanks for a fine book
Informative and correct
In-depth
Easy reading
All statements were crossed checked for truth and accuracy
Excellent research
Recommend reading for everyone
Thanks for a fine book
June 14, 2020
Thorough, well researched and unbiased. Every claim of false statement is backed up and verifiable. The information in the book is not new. The authors, however, have gathered and organized the information in an easily digestible format.
July 30, 2020
I just had to. Didn't learn anything new, but I'm better educated when I have a discussion with my brothers.
November 6, 2020
A good book about Donald Trump and his lies by The Washington Post reporter who does the Pinocchio column of politicians lies. Trump outdoes himself time and time again.
July 2, 2020
Perhaps, because of this Coronavirus pandemic and staying home too much, I'm growing impatient and grumpy, making the book "Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth", by the FactCheck staff at the Washington Post, the third consecutive book I stopped reading about half way through. I felt it was becoming tiresome, because it's pretty much a compilation of everything I've been hearing for the past several years. However, after a respite of a few days, I relented and did go back and finish the book.
As the book's title makes clear, the book deals with President Trump's tendency to take liberties with the truth. The Fact Checking team at the Washington Post have collected Trump's statements, and point out the inconsistencies or the exaggerated claims he makes. But it's not just fact checkers or opponents of the President who point this out. Many Trump supporters and members of his own Administration have been as critical if not more so of the President's trouble with the truth. Trump's longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, called out the President for falsehoods, saying he's even more dishonest behind the scenes than he appears in public. Anthony Scaramucci, Trump's short-lived White House Director of Communications, has called Trump a congenital liar. Defense Secretary James Mattis said Trump is impervious to facts. And Chris Christie, a friend and supporter of Trump, told CNN in February, 2019 that Trump will lie about things he doesn't even need to lie about - that's worse in many respects.
The basis of this book is that Trump's own words are easily and readily shown to be false or very misleading, and the Fact Checkers of the Washington Post have been compiling these misstatements for the past three years. Some people, such as Casey Mulligan, chief economist of Trump's Council of Economic Advisers from 2018 - 2019, believe that making exaggerated claims is part of Trump's strategy for getting additional press coverage. A simple statement by the President on one of his policies may generate only a minor newspaper column. However, when Trump deliberately exaggerates, he knows that the press will want to correct him, and in so doing, unwittingly provide much more coverage of whatever policy statement the President is making. This further helps the President get his message out to his supporters, who readily forgive any exaggerations or embellishments, and instead simply retain the main point which the President is trying to make.
As an example, when the President recently talked about building over 200 miles of a powerful NEW border wall with Mexico, the Fact Checkers note that only about 3 miles of NEW fence have been built. The rest of those 200 miles of fencing are simply rebuilds and repairs to sections of pre-existing wall. So the Fact Checkers have caught the President making a statement which is demonstrably wrong, since only about 3 miles, not 200 miles, of NEW wall have been built. But supporters only care that the border is more secure than it was previously. So by exaggerating claims, the President is using the mainstream media to write and talk even more about the message he's trying to get out to the public. Supporters don't care how many "Pinocchios" the Fact Checkers give to the President's statements, and only get more angry over mainstream media "nit-picking" criticisms of the President.
Meanwhile, opponents of the President become more critical because of these exaggerations and false statements. As another example, in October, 2018, in a rare bi-partisan measure, Congress passed a bill addressing the Opioid epidemic. The Bill passed 393 to 8 in the House, and 98 to 1 in the Senate, and the only Senator to vote against was a Republican. But, at a rally in Ohio, Trump said the bill passed with very little Democratic support - quite a misrepresentation of the facts. Democrats complain that the President is lying and further polarizing the Country, and that if the President wanted to unite the Country, this was a missed opportunity to show he could work with both Parties to get things done.
This behavior of the President isn't new. As he states in his own earlier books, he seems to take pride in his ability to spin a story to his own benefit. In "The Art of the Deal", Trump doesn't use the word "lie" about his distortions, embellishments, falsehoods, or "alternate facts", but instead refers to them as "hyperbole", which by definition means these are at best overstatements or exaggerations, and not to be taken literally. He found this practice useful in his real estate development dealings, giving banks and buyers a positive feeling about buying into his properties as "the best ever", "the grandest", "the most luxuriant", etc. Associating the Trump name with everything that's "the best ever" has served him well in his business, and he's made hyperbole part of his persona. He describes himself as "the smartest", "the richest", "the most physically fit", "the best deal maker", "smarter than the Generals", "the best negotiator", "least racist person ever", etc. That's how he's marketed his brand, and how he's marketing himself in the Presidency.
Whether this is harmless embellishment to make his supporters feel good, or whether these false statements result in people "tuning him out" because they stop believing anything he says is an unanswered question in the book. If the President lies too much, would the Country know if his recommendations are really the best course of action, or simply something of a political nature or for self-aggrandizement. If people stop taking his statements seriously, it could be very dangerous for the Country.
The authors acknowledge that Trump isn't the first or only politician to be caught in a lie. Politicians in both parties will bend the truth if it works to their advantage. And they've noted that past Presidents have lied, perhaps to protect national security, to gain advantage in diplomacy, to shield the public from damaging information, or sometimes lie inadvertently due to sloppy work of a staffer.
President Eisenhower lied about sending secret spy planes over the USSR, but was caught when the Soviets shot down the U2 spy plane and captured Gary Francis Powers. He subsequently referred to this lie as his greatest regret during his presidency. LBJ lied about minimizing the Vietnam War, and decided not to run for a second term as president. Nixon lied about Watergate, and resigned the presidency following the scandal. Reagan lied about the Iran-Contra scandal, which tainted his legacy. Clinton lied about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, and subsequently was forced to apologize for his lies. George W. Bush erroneously declared in his State of the Union Address that Saddam Hussein was seeking yellowcake for his WMD program, but that statement was later shown to be false and based on inconclusive research. And Obama famously declared that "...if you like your health care, you can keep it", and didn't work out well for him. But generally, these erroneous statements were "owned" by each speaker, and they regretted making them.
Trump, on the other hand, rather than admitting to a misstatement, a fabrication, or a lie, simply denies it with no remorse. With no acknowledgement of making false statements by the President, the Fact Checkers believed it was important to point out that we shouldn't accept every statement from the President without first checking those claims. They believe that had journalists done a better job prior to invasion of Iraq, the Bush claim in his State of the Union address that Saddam Hussein was seeking yellowcake in Africa for developing nuclear weapons may have been shown to be false, and an unnecessary war may have been avoided. At that time, the press was too willing to take the Administration's words as fact and didn't challenge enough. As a result, we went to war, leading to continuing turmoil in the Middle East, leading to untold numbers of injuries and deaths, and costing trillions of dollars. If at some point in the future President Trump might declare that Iran, North Korea, or some other adversary is presenting an imminent threat to our country, we'd all like to have trust that the President is telling the truth, and that the facts behind the claim have been verified by people not afraid to speak the truth to power.
Because the President never apologizes, and Administration officials who have disagreed with President's statements don't keep their jobs very long, the Fact Checkers at the Washington Post are trying to ensure that the public is aware when official statement coming from our Government are known to be inaccurate. So far, they've come up with a catalog of over 16,000 examples of lies or misstatements in his first several years in Office.
But at this point in time, I'm beginning to question if further Presidential lies are having an impact on Trump supporters or Trump haters. Everyone is in their own camp, and after documenting the first hundred, the first thousand, or the first ten thousand examples of lying, no one seems to be influenced any more. Supporters mostly recognize that the President isn't always telling the truth, but accept that as Trump's way to mess with people, to spin up the press, or to give supporters what they want to hear. To supporters, it's an aside to what the President is trying to do, which is to reduce corporate and individual tax rates, cut regulations, tighten the borders, and appoint the "right type" of judges to the courts. Meanwhile, Trump opponents are no longer surprised by the President's misstatements, and have long ago stopped listening to him.
So to me, the book isn't likely to influence readers, but is probably most useful as a convenient resource for future journalists looking for a collection of President's most outrageous transgressions compiled in one location, or perhaps useful to someone just coming out of a coma over the past three or four years.
Readers will find that the book contains a collection sound clips of Trump's speeches, selections of his tweets, letters, or other written remarks, each of which has been reviewed and proven to be in conflict with the actual facts. Some are gross distortions or just plain wrong, others are half-truths or made-up statements which have no basis in fact.
The first section of the book lists a number of Trump's most noteworthy falsehoods across all subjects, such as:
Stormy Daniels and paying her hush money;
The promise to build a southern border wall which will be paid for by Mexico;
The claim that his policies didn't separate children from parents at Mexican border (falsely blamed Obama for the law);
That he ensured all Americans will get health insurance, even with preexisting conditions;
That he is strengthening NATO;
That he made it possible for Veterans to go to private hospitals if VA facilities are filled (Obama enacted that legislation 2 yrs earlier, Trump simply updated it);
That he gave taxpayers the biggest tax cut in American history; (according to the Treasury Dept means of measuring, it's the 8th largest cut in the past 100 years);
That between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes caused Trump to lose popular vote;
That Obama had Trump's phones tapped in Trump Tower;
That he's the most popular Republican EVER! (The data shows that among recent GOP Presidents, GW Bush, Reagan, GHW Bush, and Ike all had higher positive ratings among Republicans.
Sections 2 through 4 detail his lies about himself, his perceived enemies, and his deception of his political base.
Section 5 shows how he uses his favorite transmitter of falsehoods - Twitter.
Sections 6 through 10 cover his major policy areas - Immigration, Economics and Trade, Foreign Policy, Ukraine, and the Coronavirus.
The Conclusion considers Trump's impact on American politics, and an Appendix shows how he combines misstatements, lies, and the occasional fact at his campaign rallies.
If there's a way to summarize the book, it may be that Trump follows the advice of his long time lawyer and mentor, Roy Cohn, which is to never admit any error, constantly repeat falsehoods, and have no shame about your tactics. Trump latches onto flimsy conspiracy theories, isn't bothered by his contradictions, gets many of his facts wrong, misleads about things big and small, and attacks his opponents with outrageously false claims and hyperbolic rhetoric. His defenders, like Rudy Giuliani, declare that there is no such thing as an absolute truth, that "truth isn't truth", and Trump simply has "alternate facts". The cumulative effect is nihilism, there is no truth, no right or wrong, no data or evidence, only relativism, point of view, and biased opinion.
Hopefully, this will not become a template to follow for future Presidents.
As the book's title makes clear, the book deals with President Trump's tendency to take liberties with the truth. The Fact Checking team at the Washington Post have collected Trump's statements, and point out the inconsistencies or the exaggerated claims he makes. But it's not just fact checkers or opponents of the President who point this out. Many Trump supporters and members of his own Administration have been as critical if not more so of the President's trouble with the truth. Trump's longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, called out the President for falsehoods, saying he's even more dishonest behind the scenes than he appears in public. Anthony Scaramucci, Trump's short-lived White House Director of Communications, has called Trump a congenital liar. Defense Secretary James Mattis said Trump is impervious to facts. And Chris Christie, a friend and supporter of Trump, told CNN in February, 2019 that Trump will lie about things he doesn't even need to lie about - that's worse in many respects.
The basis of this book is that Trump's own words are easily and readily shown to be false or very misleading, and the Fact Checkers of the Washington Post have been compiling these misstatements for the past three years. Some people, such as Casey Mulligan, chief economist of Trump's Council of Economic Advisers from 2018 - 2019, believe that making exaggerated claims is part of Trump's strategy for getting additional press coverage. A simple statement by the President on one of his policies may generate only a minor newspaper column. However, when Trump deliberately exaggerates, he knows that the press will want to correct him, and in so doing, unwittingly provide much more coverage of whatever policy statement the President is making. This further helps the President get his message out to his supporters, who readily forgive any exaggerations or embellishments, and instead simply retain the main point which the President is trying to make.
As an example, when the President recently talked about building over 200 miles of a powerful NEW border wall with Mexico, the Fact Checkers note that only about 3 miles of NEW fence have been built. The rest of those 200 miles of fencing are simply rebuilds and repairs to sections of pre-existing wall. So the Fact Checkers have caught the President making a statement which is demonstrably wrong, since only about 3 miles, not 200 miles, of NEW wall have been built. But supporters only care that the border is more secure than it was previously. So by exaggerating claims, the President is using the mainstream media to write and talk even more about the message he's trying to get out to the public. Supporters don't care how many "Pinocchios" the Fact Checkers give to the President's statements, and only get more angry over mainstream media "nit-picking" criticisms of the President.
Meanwhile, opponents of the President become more critical because of these exaggerations and false statements. As another example, in October, 2018, in a rare bi-partisan measure, Congress passed a bill addressing the Opioid epidemic. The Bill passed 393 to 8 in the House, and 98 to 1 in the Senate, and the only Senator to vote against was a Republican. But, at a rally in Ohio, Trump said the bill passed with very little Democratic support - quite a misrepresentation of the facts. Democrats complain that the President is lying and further polarizing the Country, and that if the President wanted to unite the Country, this was a missed opportunity to show he could work with both Parties to get things done.
This behavior of the President isn't new. As he states in his own earlier books, he seems to take pride in his ability to spin a story to his own benefit. In "The Art of the Deal", Trump doesn't use the word "lie" about his distortions, embellishments, falsehoods, or "alternate facts", but instead refers to them as "hyperbole", which by definition means these are at best overstatements or exaggerations, and not to be taken literally. He found this practice useful in his real estate development dealings, giving banks and buyers a positive feeling about buying into his properties as "the best ever", "the grandest", "the most luxuriant", etc. Associating the Trump name with everything that's "the best ever" has served him well in his business, and he's made hyperbole part of his persona. He describes himself as "the smartest", "the richest", "the most physically fit", "the best deal maker", "smarter than the Generals", "the best negotiator", "least racist person ever", etc. That's how he's marketed his brand, and how he's marketing himself in the Presidency.
Whether this is harmless embellishment to make his supporters feel good, or whether these false statements result in people "tuning him out" because they stop believing anything he says is an unanswered question in the book. If the President lies too much, would the Country know if his recommendations are really the best course of action, or simply something of a political nature or for self-aggrandizement. If people stop taking his statements seriously, it could be very dangerous for the Country.
The authors acknowledge that Trump isn't the first or only politician to be caught in a lie. Politicians in both parties will bend the truth if it works to their advantage. And they've noted that past Presidents have lied, perhaps to protect national security, to gain advantage in diplomacy, to shield the public from damaging information, or sometimes lie inadvertently due to sloppy work of a staffer.
President Eisenhower lied about sending secret spy planes over the USSR, but was caught when the Soviets shot down the U2 spy plane and captured Gary Francis Powers. He subsequently referred to this lie as his greatest regret during his presidency. LBJ lied about minimizing the Vietnam War, and decided not to run for a second term as president. Nixon lied about Watergate, and resigned the presidency following the scandal. Reagan lied about the Iran-Contra scandal, which tainted his legacy. Clinton lied about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, and subsequently was forced to apologize for his lies. George W. Bush erroneously declared in his State of the Union Address that Saddam Hussein was seeking yellowcake for his WMD program, but that statement was later shown to be false and based on inconclusive research. And Obama famously declared that "...if you like your health care, you can keep it", and didn't work out well for him. But generally, these erroneous statements were "owned" by each speaker, and they regretted making them.
Trump, on the other hand, rather than admitting to a misstatement, a fabrication, or a lie, simply denies it with no remorse. With no acknowledgement of making false statements by the President, the Fact Checkers believed it was important to point out that we shouldn't accept every statement from the President without first checking those claims. They believe that had journalists done a better job prior to invasion of Iraq, the Bush claim in his State of the Union address that Saddam Hussein was seeking yellowcake in Africa for developing nuclear weapons may have been shown to be false, and an unnecessary war may have been avoided. At that time, the press was too willing to take the Administration's words as fact and didn't challenge enough. As a result, we went to war, leading to continuing turmoil in the Middle East, leading to untold numbers of injuries and deaths, and costing trillions of dollars. If at some point in the future President Trump might declare that Iran, North Korea, or some other adversary is presenting an imminent threat to our country, we'd all like to have trust that the President is telling the truth, and that the facts behind the claim have been verified by people not afraid to speak the truth to power.
Because the President never apologizes, and Administration officials who have disagreed with President's statements don't keep their jobs very long, the Fact Checkers at the Washington Post are trying to ensure that the public is aware when official statement coming from our Government are known to be inaccurate. So far, they've come up with a catalog of over 16,000 examples of lies or misstatements in his first several years in Office.
But at this point in time, I'm beginning to question if further Presidential lies are having an impact on Trump supporters or Trump haters. Everyone is in their own camp, and after documenting the first hundred, the first thousand, or the first ten thousand examples of lying, no one seems to be influenced any more. Supporters mostly recognize that the President isn't always telling the truth, but accept that as Trump's way to mess with people, to spin up the press, or to give supporters what they want to hear. To supporters, it's an aside to what the President is trying to do, which is to reduce corporate and individual tax rates, cut regulations, tighten the borders, and appoint the "right type" of judges to the courts. Meanwhile, Trump opponents are no longer surprised by the President's misstatements, and have long ago stopped listening to him.
So to me, the book isn't likely to influence readers, but is probably most useful as a convenient resource for future journalists looking for a collection of President's most outrageous transgressions compiled in one location, or perhaps useful to someone just coming out of a coma over the past three or four years.
Readers will find that the book contains a collection sound clips of Trump's speeches, selections of his tweets, letters, or other written remarks, each of which has been reviewed and proven to be in conflict with the actual facts. Some are gross distortions or just plain wrong, others are half-truths or made-up statements which have no basis in fact.
The first section of the book lists a number of Trump's most noteworthy falsehoods across all subjects, such as:
Stormy Daniels and paying her hush money;
The promise to build a southern border wall which will be paid for by Mexico;
The claim that his policies didn't separate children from parents at Mexican border (falsely blamed Obama for the law);
That he ensured all Americans will get health insurance, even with preexisting conditions;
That he is strengthening NATO;
That he made it possible for Veterans to go to private hospitals if VA facilities are filled (Obama enacted that legislation 2 yrs earlier, Trump simply updated it);
That he gave taxpayers the biggest tax cut in American history; (according to the Treasury Dept means of measuring, it's the 8th largest cut in the past 100 years);
That between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes caused Trump to lose popular vote;
That Obama had Trump's phones tapped in Trump Tower;
That he's the most popular Republican EVER! (The data shows that among recent GOP Presidents, GW Bush, Reagan, GHW Bush, and Ike all had higher positive ratings among Republicans.
Sections 2 through 4 detail his lies about himself, his perceived enemies, and his deception of his political base.
Section 5 shows how he uses his favorite transmitter of falsehoods - Twitter.
Sections 6 through 10 cover his major policy areas - Immigration, Economics and Trade, Foreign Policy, Ukraine, and the Coronavirus.
The Conclusion considers Trump's impact on American politics, and an Appendix shows how he combines misstatements, lies, and the occasional fact at his campaign rallies.
If there's a way to summarize the book, it may be that Trump follows the advice of his long time lawyer and mentor, Roy Cohn, which is to never admit any error, constantly repeat falsehoods, and have no shame about your tactics. Trump latches onto flimsy conspiracy theories, isn't bothered by his contradictions, gets many of his facts wrong, misleads about things big and small, and attacks his opponents with outrageously false claims and hyperbolic rhetoric. His defenders, like Rudy Giuliani, declare that there is no such thing as an absolute truth, that "truth isn't truth", and Trump simply has "alternate facts". The cumulative effect is nihilism, there is no truth, no right or wrong, no data or evidence, only relativism, point of view, and biased opinion.
Hopefully, this will not become a template to follow for future Presidents.
June 19, 2020
It's tough to relive this walk through the Trump years without your stomach flipping over and getting sick.
June 18, 2020
Timely update on the spurious ramblings of the small man who thinks he's king.
June 10, 2020
A Good Read
A concise rendering of the facts hidden by
Trump's ramblings and distortions. Based on easily verified information most of us could find with minimal WEB browsing.
A concise rendering of the facts hidden by
Trump's ramblings and distortions. Based on easily verified information most of us could find with minimal WEB browsing.
August 14, 2020
The Preverication of the President could also be a subtitle of this work. The Fact Checker of The Washington Post and its team of top journalists look at the various ways that our current President, Donald J. Trump, side-steps, spins yarns, and baldly lies about many things. Besides the out-and- out lies, falsities, fairy tales, and plain ol' whoppers, just his day to day tweet storms on his social platform of choice, Twitter, provide the drops that break the dam holding back the torrent of our current Commander-in-Chief,s' prevarications. Told with a straight face, our Commander-in-
Chief takes to task the incredible and multifarious ways in which he embellishes, stretches, and even breaks the mold of Presidential fact-checking.
The Washington Post's Fact Checker team presents a range of false statements, exaggerations, and poorly couched lies in various venues for our current "Fearless Leader." Of one thing you can be sure, the work has a significant amount of verified misstatements, yarns, tall-tales, and flat-out lies with solid support for the "Fact Checker" team to scrutinize, evaluate, and describe in detail the nature of his false statements, responses, and allegations.
While he has been in the first term of his Presidency, Donald Trump has definitely been a colorful player on the most important of all elected jobs in our country, that of President. As the Leader of the Free World, Mr. Trump has been, at the times, colorful, challenging, and at times downright hilarious. Some of his grandiose statements, allegations, and patent falsehoods are undeniable by even the least informed American citizens. Those who form some his most loyal servants and followers seem to be oblivious to the daily diatribe from "the Swamp." Regardless of your position concerning President Trump, he is definitely playing to his audience whenever he steps up to the microphone. He may be taking credit for a recent event - which is usually true, but he may also interject his opinion on something that is out of left field. The one thing which cannot be denied is his ability to provide an interesting story regardless of the venue.
This book clearly rates a 5 out of 5 stars on my thoughts about the books I read. It is clearly a fact checher's dream to read coming from one of the nation's most respected and established newspapers, The Washington Post. It is worth any reader's time to read and enjoy, especially anyone interested in getting a story straight and honest.
Chief takes to task the incredible and multifarious ways in which he embellishes, stretches, and even breaks the mold of Presidential fact-checking.
The Washington Post's Fact Checker team presents a range of false statements, exaggerations, and poorly couched lies in various venues for our current "Fearless Leader." Of one thing you can be sure, the work has a significant amount of verified misstatements, yarns, tall-tales, and flat-out lies with solid support for the "Fact Checker" team to scrutinize, evaluate, and describe in detail the nature of his false statements, responses, and allegations.
While he has been in the first term of his Presidency, Donald Trump has definitely been a colorful player on the most important of all elected jobs in our country, that of President. As the Leader of the Free World, Mr. Trump has been, at the times, colorful, challenging, and at times downright hilarious. Some of his grandiose statements, allegations, and patent falsehoods are undeniable by even the least informed American citizens. Those who form some his most loyal servants and followers seem to be oblivious to the daily diatribe from "the Swamp." Regardless of your position concerning President Trump, he is definitely playing to his audience whenever he steps up to the microphone. He may be taking credit for a recent event - which is usually true, but he may also interject his opinion on something that is out of left field. The one thing which cannot be denied is his ability to provide an interesting story regardless of the venue.
This book clearly rates a 5 out of 5 stars on my thoughts about the books I read. It is clearly a fact checher's dream to read coming from one of the nation's most respected and established newspapers, The Washington Post. It is worth any reader's time to read and enjoy, especially anyone interested in getting a story straight and honest.
October 24, 2021
How do you deal with some one that doesn't live in reality? how do you make sense of some one that has no sense? not even common sense? Someone that lies and lies and lies and lies, and when facing his lies, chooses to lie about it some more? Do you ignore them? And when they don’t allow that? How to deal with a pathological liar? I mean forget everything, forget political events, political colors, don’t even bother with the topic. It doesn’t matter! This guy lies about everything! From his father birthplace to his own nationality, anything, and everything! You don’t need to check anything this guy says. Sure, some will be truth, but that like saying that a coin has two faces, that’s irrelevant! This guy attitude through truth is inexistent! He is moved by in personal interest, and he doesn’t give a dam about anyone and anything. Forget about it!
August 30, 2021
This book is fake news! Absolutely the worst. Sad
Just kidding, there's loads of good stuff in here. What I found most interesting was the investigation and thinking behind how Trump decides which 'lies' seem to catch on and thus picks which ones he uses again and again to build up support amongst his base.
I think the book did a good job of grouping together themes of falsehoods, so that it doesn't just come across as one big list or as an entirely chronological summary of Trump's time in the spotlight.
Also overall, it's just so important that we have fact checkers supported in the current age. It's far too easy for people to take information as truth without any evidence and in that we have to rely on the support of fact checkers to know what's really going on.
Just kidding, there's loads of good stuff in here. What I found most interesting was the investigation and thinking behind how Trump decides which 'lies' seem to catch on and thus picks which ones he uses again and again to build up support amongst his base.
I think the book did a good job of grouping together themes of falsehoods, so that it doesn't just come across as one big list or as an entirely chronological summary of Trump's time in the spotlight.
Also overall, it's just so important that we have fact checkers supported in the current age. It's far too easy for people to take information as truth without any evidence and in that we have to rely on the support of fact checkers to know what's really going on.
March 1, 2021
Much more engaging than I expected, considering I lived through and remember most of it. Decent editorial choices, considering the huge amount of material they had to edit down, and they way they organized it. I really appreciate what they did with tracking his lies over the years. Along with Daniel Dale, they're real heroes. This, along with the columns, are important historical records.
June 13, 2020
The context in which this book comes is hilarious: notice the lies of the guy in power, vote for the guy who brought you the Patriot Act and more prison time for minorities for victimless crimes.
August 25, 2024
Washington Post Fact Checker staff -- I knew all this but it's important to be reminded.
October 17, 2024
Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President's Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies (2020) by The Washington Post Fact Checker Staff
Sadly, this book is still relevant in 2024 and might remain relevant for four more ghastly years if Trump manages to win the Electoral College again. Even though the book came out in 2020 while Trump was still mismanaging the COVID-19 pandemic, producing hundreds of thousands of excess American deaths, and before he added "convicted felon" to his list of accomplishments, Trump is still spewing many of the same or similar lies as he dupes half the nation again. For example, Trump is once again predicting ecomonic collapse if his opponent (Kamala Harris) wins. Trump has used that line in all three of his campaigns. It's only been tested once so far as I write, by Joe Biden's win. As we near the end of Biden's term, the economy looks to be in pretty good shape. Biden cleaned up the mess that Trump left. Unemployment is down, the inflation rate has cooled, the stock market is up (in contrast to Trump's own stock that cratered), etc. The USA recovered better from the COVID-19 slowdown than most other developed nations' economies. But not if you live in Trump's world of alternative facts, where everything is a disaster which only Trump can fix.
Even if you're a fairly well-informed news reader, it's still hard to keep up with Trump's firehose of falsehoods on your own. Fortunately this book details a selection of Trump's documented lies (as well as confirming the rare correct Trump claim), giving you a unique lens into the twisted workings of what passes for the mind beneath the combover.
It will be nice if and when AI progresses enough to give everyone an AI assistant capable of fact-checking everything we read, hear, speak, or write, and in real time. (Like having your own staff of human fact-checkers to set the record straight.) That might really change the game, since Trump's habit of constant lying only works because half the nation is gullible and misinformed. Of course, just because AI might become capable of fact-checking the lies of Trump (and the recorded lies of earlier figures such as Rush Limbaugh who taught Trump how to lie), that doesn't mean people will necessarily use AI that way. It might be up to people who care about truth to arm themselves with AI so they can persuade the truth-rejectors more effectively.
I noticed only one error in the book edition I read:
Everything looks good until that last sentence. The Ghawar field was originally by far the world's largest oil field and still has quite a bit left. According to Wikipedia that was over 50 billion barrels around the time of the book's publication, not just 70 million. The book might have a simple typo of "million" instead of "billion."
So, here I sit in mid-October 2024 wondering how the fate of the world will be decided in just three short weeks. I can only imagine what it's like to be sitting in Ukraine wondering the same thing, only without having a vote, and knowing that a Trump win means you'll be getting served up to Putin as a Christmas gift with a knife in your back.
If Trump loses, then this book might become less immediately relevant, but it will still be vital reading. The same psychological defects that make people easy marks for Trump won't have gone away. Plenty of would-be Trumps are itching to replace him and tap the same reservoir of gullibility, fear, prejudice, and discontent. If the next Trump is actually competent, we could be in real trouble - if we aren't already.
Sadly, this book is still relevant in 2024 and might remain relevant for four more ghastly years if Trump manages to win the Electoral College again. Even though the book came out in 2020 while Trump was still mismanaging the COVID-19 pandemic, producing hundreds of thousands of excess American deaths, and before he added "convicted felon" to his list of accomplishments, Trump is still spewing many of the same or similar lies as he dupes half the nation again. For example, Trump is once again predicting ecomonic collapse if his opponent (Kamala Harris) wins. Trump has used that line in all three of his campaigns. It's only been tested once so far as I write, by Joe Biden's win. As we near the end of Biden's term, the economy looks to be in pretty good shape. Biden cleaned up the mess that Trump left. Unemployment is down, the inflation rate has cooled, the stock market is up (in contrast to Trump's own stock that cratered), etc. The USA recovered better from the COVID-19 slowdown than most other developed nations' economies. But not if you live in Trump's world of alternative facts, where everything is a disaster which only Trump can fix.
Even if you're a fairly well-informed news reader, it's still hard to keep up with Trump's firehose of falsehoods on your own. Fortunately this book details a selection of Trump's documented lies (as well as confirming the rare correct Trump claim), giving you a unique lens into the twisted workings of what passes for the mind beneath the combover.
It will be nice if and when AI progresses enough to give everyone an AI assistant capable of fact-checking everything we read, hear, speak, or write, and in real time. (Like having your own staff of human fact-checkers to set the record straight.) That might really change the game, since Trump's habit of constant lying only works because half the nation is gullible and misinformed. Of course, just because AI might become capable of fact-checking the lies of Trump (and the recorded lies of earlier figures such as Rush Limbaugh who taught Trump how to lie), that doesn't mean people will necessarily use AI that way. It might be up to people who care about truth to arm themselves with AI so they can persuade the truth-rejectors more effectively.
I noticed only one error in the book edition I read:
The Trump administration is seeking to open the entire coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration, picking the most aggressive development option for an area long closed to drilling.
The U.S. Geological Survey projected that anywhere from 5.7 billion to 16 billion barrels of oil could be drilled from this land. That doesn’t even make it the biggest drilling site in Alaska. Its average estimated oil reserves fall below Prudhoe Bay’s 13.6 billion barrels but are similar to the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska’s 10.6 billion barrels. The Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia, which has been producing oil since the 1950s, has 70 million barrels left in reserves.
Everything looks good until that last sentence. The Ghawar field was originally by far the world's largest oil field and still has quite a bit left. According to Wikipedia that was over 50 billion barrels around the time of the book's publication, not just 70 million. The book might have a simple typo of "million" instead of "billion."
So, here I sit in mid-October 2024 wondering how the fate of the world will be decided in just three short weeks. I can only imagine what it's like to be sitting in Ukraine wondering the same thing, only without having a vote, and knowing that a Trump win means you'll be getting served up to Putin as a Christmas gift with a knife in your back.
If Trump loses, then this book might become less immediately relevant, but it will still be vital reading. The same psychological defects that make people easy marks for Trump won't have gone away. Plenty of would-be Trumps are itching to replace him and tap the same reservoir of gullibility, fear, prejudice, and discontent. If the next Trump is actually competent, we could be in real trouble - if we aren't already.
September 3, 2020
I chose to read "Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President's Falsehoods...." because I have seen comments in the news and heard commentary that often asserts that he lies - a 'Lot'. As I am not a news reporter, nor a Republican, I often cannot tell whether the things President Trump says are accurate or "true", or simply exaggerations and, possibly, jokes. He sometimes disclaims what he has said because people call him out on his untruths. He says his comments are jokes. He also says that some truths that appear in the news are a "hoax". Anything Donald Trump does not approve, or more significantly, comments he did not initiate, or is not the first to propose, he will say is a "hoax". So I discount a lot of what he says, but I wanted some real clarification.
The authors of this book, Glenn Kessler, and Meg Kelly, are with the Washington Post (Mr. Kessler is the Editor), and Salvador Rizzo is national politics reporter for the Washington Post. As such, they do a lion's share of the fact checking on public speakers, and particularly the president and his staff.
The one fact that is featured early in this book is that they have tallied and logged 16,241 lies, that Donald Trump is responsible for having uttered since his inauguration and up to January 20, 2020. Sixteen-thousand false and misleading statements ! And we are now in the month of September, fast approaching November when we must all vote for someone to serve as our leader in the next administration.
This book is wonderfully organized and can be read with great ease. It contains instructive visuals, a bar graph depicting the number of lies Trump has told by months, several topics highlighted in gray tone indicating some of the targets he has chosen to denigrate (including major "rat-infested" cities), and explanation of The Fact-Checker's "Pinocchio" system for measuring the degree to which President Trump has gone to mislead and denigrate others by being untruthful. And the authors have gone to considerable efforts to provide verbatim quotes by the President, with clarifications and explanations of the facts behind the misleading comments.
The book is divided into segments and chapters, with Pinocchio heads between each of the president's misstatements. I found it to be a fun read...if unsettling at times. While it does not contain all the misstatements Donald Trump said over the course of his first term in Office, the book has a goodly number accounted for in its 344 pages.
I am anxious that this story be shared with as many Americans as possible. Maybe it will serve as a good lesson for future political aspirants who want to become civic leaders or the President. Hopefully, it will be a useful "Word to the Wise" Sufficient to encourage all of Us to look for our next leader in a different part of our government. Personally, I'm hoping Joe Biden will step into the role next January. (I'm certainly planning on voting for him and for Kamala Harris.)
The authors of this book, Glenn Kessler, and Meg Kelly, are with the Washington Post (Mr. Kessler is the Editor), and Salvador Rizzo is national politics reporter for the Washington Post. As such, they do a lion's share of the fact checking on public speakers, and particularly the president and his staff.
The one fact that is featured early in this book is that they have tallied and logged 16,241 lies, that Donald Trump is responsible for having uttered since his inauguration and up to January 20, 2020. Sixteen-thousand false and misleading statements ! And we are now in the month of September, fast approaching November when we must all vote for someone to serve as our leader in the next administration.
This book is wonderfully organized and can be read with great ease. It contains instructive visuals, a bar graph depicting the number of lies Trump has told by months, several topics highlighted in gray tone indicating some of the targets he has chosen to denigrate (including major "rat-infested" cities), and explanation of The Fact-Checker's "Pinocchio" system for measuring the degree to which President Trump has gone to mislead and denigrate others by being untruthful. And the authors have gone to considerable efforts to provide verbatim quotes by the President, with clarifications and explanations of the facts behind the misleading comments.
The book is divided into segments and chapters, with Pinocchio heads between each of the president's misstatements. I found it to be a fun read...if unsettling at times. While it does not contain all the misstatements Donald Trump said over the course of his first term in Office, the book has a goodly number accounted for in its 344 pages.
I am anxious that this story be shared with as many Americans as possible. Maybe it will serve as a good lesson for future political aspirants who want to become civic leaders or the President. Hopefully, it will be a useful "Word to the Wise" Sufficient to encourage all of Us to look for our next leader in a different part of our government. Personally, I'm hoping Joe Biden will step into the role next January. (I'm certainly planning on voting for him and for Kamala Harris.)
November 15, 2023
The Truth is Almost Always more Frightening than Fiction
This Listen makes clear that the ascendency of Donald Trump and the MAGA Doctrine is as unprecedented as it is ominous. An Icy Reality that must compel the previously non chalant (I include myself) to extricate ourselves from our political apathy, and work tirelessly to assist those best suited to sound the alarm on our impending doom, should this insane sociopath ever again be allowed to marry his evil with real power. No matter how small each individual impact may be, a determined an collective effort will prove successful in ridding the nation of the Trump plague and stay the breakdown of our freedoms and democracy. The stakes have never been higher, America is ours to lose.
The sad truth: At an indefinable point, We the people lost ourselves, somewhere out there between the intersection of fear and hate, becoming that which we have always despised, that which we have fought so valiantly against, that which is the very antithesis of who we truly are.
Like so many others, I am shit scared. There's no elegance in that, nothing poetic or moving that can be written to describe it, Nothing. This terror will without warning suddenly creep into my conscious, constricting around my throat like a silken scarf that is bound too tightly, and for that moment I cannot breathe with ease. A seemlessly neverending nightmare, yet even upon waking, my eyes continue to burn as my inverted tears drop into a sunken cavity pulsing with the ache of my nation's woes. In that single tear, I feel akin to all my fellow Americans who have endured these last four years: this onslaught cold and cruel occurrences; this sick joke imposed on us. Yet still, the indomitable human spirit endured the horror of Trump's Presidency with beautiful and terrifying patience and fortitude.
The other more hopeful truth: We are not defined by these last years, nor are we eternally linked to Trumpism. Our salvation and redemption lies in an outright rebuke of everything Trump.
Yes we are flawed, yes we have erred and yes we have fallen. We are, afterall, only human. Paradoxically, it is our flawed and fragile humanity that will also prove our salvation. Man's true beauty lies entirely in culmination of his mistakes as they dance exquisitely with his binaries, ringed with flame and pulsing like that of a sensual salsa routine.
Humanity’s true soul is seen in the small, significant and everyday kindnesses that elevate it instantaneously, like the immortal bird of flame as it rises from its bed of ashes. The sincerity of the Phoenix lies not in its bold and majestic extravagance, but in the ashes that framed and defined all it lived to be.
This Listen makes clear that the ascendency of Donald Trump and the MAGA Doctrine is as unprecedented as it is ominous. An Icy Reality that must compel the previously non chalant (I include myself) to extricate ourselves from our political apathy, and work tirelessly to assist those best suited to sound the alarm on our impending doom, should this insane sociopath ever again be allowed to marry his evil with real power. No matter how small each individual impact may be, a determined an collective effort will prove successful in ridding the nation of the Trump plague and stay the breakdown of our freedoms and democracy. The stakes have never been higher, America is ours to lose.
The sad truth: At an indefinable point, We the people lost ourselves, somewhere out there between the intersection of fear and hate, becoming that which we have always despised, that which we have fought so valiantly against, that which is the very antithesis of who we truly are.
Like so many others, I am shit scared. There's no elegance in that, nothing poetic or moving that can be written to describe it, Nothing. This terror will without warning suddenly creep into my conscious, constricting around my throat like a silken scarf that is bound too tightly, and for that moment I cannot breathe with ease. A seemlessly neverending nightmare, yet even upon waking, my eyes continue to burn as my inverted tears drop into a sunken cavity pulsing with the ache of my nation's woes. In that single tear, I feel akin to all my fellow Americans who have endured these last four years: this onslaught cold and cruel occurrences; this sick joke imposed on us. Yet still, the indomitable human spirit endured the horror of Trump's Presidency with beautiful and terrifying patience and fortitude.
The other more hopeful truth: We are not defined by these last years, nor are we eternally linked to Trumpism. Our salvation and redemption lies in an outright rebuke of everything Trump.
Yes we are flawed, yes we have erred and yes we have fallen. We are, afterall, only human. Paradoxically, it is our flawed and fragile humanity that will also prove our salvation. Man's true beauty lies entirely in culmination of his mistakes as they dance exquisitely with his binaries, ringed with flame and pulsing like that of a sensual salsa routine.
Humanity’s true soul is seen in the small, significant and everyday kindnesses that elevate it instantaneously, like the immortal bird of flame as it rises from its bed of ashes. The sincerity of the Phoenix lies not in its bold and majestic extravagance, but in the ashes that framed and defined all it lived to be.
June 22, 2020
There is no better feeling on a hot, humid day, with sweat dripping down your face and temperatures overing in triple digits, to soak your face in a splash of cold water. The water rejuvenates because it is so different, so much colder than the heat bearing down on you. That feeling is close to the one you may feel when reading "Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth," because it is as a close as anything else to a political cold-water splash on a brutal and searing day (or, rather 3 years).
The Washington Post Fact-Checker team, of Pinocchio fame, make a concerted effort not simply to reveal the falsehoods and point out the accurate facts and figures, but to provide context to the scale of Donald Trump's assault on truth. According to the authors, the president has made something north of 16,000 false statements to date, a number staggering, but hardly surprising, to anyone living through 2020.
The book proceeds thematically through Trump's misstatements, ranging from domestic to foreign policy and everything else in-between. One of the lodestars of the lying is vanity: everything is great under President Trump, was horrible under any past president, and will be even greater if he is re-elected (please, dear reader of this review, make sure that that doesn't happen!). However, one of the best aspects of the book is the dissection of just one rally, and pulling back the curtain on each lie and falsehood, in the order it spews from the orange-tinged face on stage. In that exercise, one can appreciate not only the scale of the lying, but the instinctual logic behind it. Trump is a showman, who knows that his audience isn't yearning for truth, or even vague promises. Rather, they want a world as Trump sees it: an Eden on the verge of ever greater glory, but for the chicanery of corrupt and meddling Democrats, Never Trumpers, and truth-tellers in the press.
Unfortunately, this book will likely not convince your crazy, Trump-loving uncle. But it does show that truth isn't dead, that there is a place not just for partisan back-and-forth, but for a robust defense of facts.
So let the cold water wash over your heated face. Turn off CNN, pick up this book, and understand how the falsehoods work, how in fact they are false, and then go forth and fight in the heat for that truth.
The Washington Post Fact-Checker team, of Pinocchio fame, make a concerted effort not simply to reveal the falsehoods and point out the accurate facts and figures, but to provide context to the scale of Donald Trump's assault on truth. According to the authors, the president has made something north of 16,000 false statements to date, a number staggering, but hardly surprising, to anyone living through 2020.
The book proceeds thematically through Trump's misstatements, ranging from domestic to foreign policy and everything else in-between. One of the lodestars of the lying is vanity: everything is great under President Trump, was horrible under any past president, and will be even greater if he is re-elected (please, dear reader of this review, make sure that that doesn't happen!). However, one of the best aspects of the book is the dissection of just one rally, and pulling back the curtain on each lie and falsehood, in the order it spews from the orange-tinged face on stage. In that exercise, one can appreciate not only the scale of the lying, but the instinctual logic behind it. Trump is a showman, who knows that his audience isn't yearning for truth, or even vague promises. Rather, they want a world as Trump sees it: an Eden on the verge of ever greater glory, but for the chicanery of corrupt and meddling Democrats, Never Trumpers, and truth-tellers in the press.
Unfortunately, this book will likely not convince your crazy, Trump-loving uncle. But it does show that truth isn't dead, that there is a place not just for partisan back-and-forth, but for a robust defense of facts.
So let the cold water wash over your heated face. Turn off CNN, pick up this book, and understand how the falsehoods work, how in fact they are false, and then go forth and fight in the heat for that truth.
July 25, 2020
Thank you to Scribner and NetGalley for the e-galley copy of Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth by The Washington Post Fact Checker Staff.
During his campaign and Presidency, at least in my opinion, Donald Trump has probably had more books written about him than any other President through a first term. Written by the Washington Post Fact Checker Staff (those folks responsible for the infamous "Pinocchios" based of depth, breadth, and seriousness of lies, falsehoods, and misstatements) Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth belongs among the most informative books written about Trump since he began his bid for the Presidency of the United States of America.
At the beginning of the book, the editors explain how the Post's Fact Checker process came about; it was started long before Donald Trump started campaigning for President. They also review the fact checking of other political figures, but the meat of the book is Trump.
Written according to timelines within topics, the entries range from the minor and seemingly mediocre (1 Pinocchio) to the overwhelming with the possibility of significant effect on the workings of our government. In order to present a balanced view, the instances in which Trump was telling the truth or at least a partial truth are included. Sadly, but factually, there just aren't very many. I did feel at times, though, that the checkers were nit-picking and would have given a different president a pass. I subscribe to the Post and often read the Fact Checker columns, but it is hard for a reader to keep up with the volume and depth of the falsehoods being spoken. The book brings it all together in one binding.
The citizens that need to read this book won't; they are so indoctrinated to the idea of "fake news" and conspiracy theories that they refuse to be presented opinions and ideas that differ from theirs which would allow them to make up their minds after receiving complete and factual information.
The Washington Post's banner on its front page is "Democracy Dies in Darkness". This book helps to enhance the Post's efforts to ensure that darkness does not descend and our democracy does not die.
During his campaign and Presidency, at least in my opinion, Donald Trump has probably had more books written about him than any other President through a first term. Written by the Washington Post Fact Checker Staff (those folks responsible for the infamous "Pinocchios" based of depth, breadth, and seriousness of lies, falsehoods, and misstatements) Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth belongs among the most informative books written about Trump since he began his bid for the Presidency of the United States of America.
At the beginning of the book, the editors explain how the Post's Fact Checker process came about; it was started long before Donald Trump started campaigning for President. They also review the fact checking of other political figures, but the meat of the book is Trump.
Written according to timelines within topics, the entries range from the minor and seemingly mediocre (1 Pinocchio) to the overwhelming with the possibility of significant effect on the workings of our government. In order to present a balanced view, the instances in which Trump was telling the truth or at least a partial truth are included. Sadly, but factually, there just aren't very many. I did feel at times, though, that the checkers were nit-picking and would have given a different president a pass. I subscribe to the Post and often read the Fact Checker columns, but it is hard for a reader to keep up with the volume and depth of the falsehoods being spoken. The book brings it all together in one binding.
The citizens that need to read this book won't; they are so indoctrinated to the idea of "fake news" and conspiracy theories that they refuse to be presented opinions and ideas that differ from theirs which would allow them to make up their minds after receiving complete and factual information.
The Washington Post's banner on its front page is "Democracy Dies in Darkness". This book helps to enhance the Post's efforts to ensure that darkness does not descend and our democracy does not die.
July 12, 2020
If you are looking for a good run-down of Donald’s lies, this is a great book to read. The authors, the fact checker staff at the Washington Post, go through, and enumerate the many, many falsehoods that the current White House occupant had uttered, and how the number of lies just keep growing. If you regularly read the fact checker on the Post, this will come as no surprise. Face it, everyone, and, in particular, every politician lies, but none like Donald Trump. He has lied so much that the American people no longer know what to believe, if anything, the president says. This continuous, routine lying has also eroded our perception of truth and the reality it bodes. The book provides an interesting, but useful, look at President trump and his lies, his repetition of them and their acceptance or non-acceptance by the American public. Never before has anyone fact-checked Donald Trump as these people have, and he knows it, but he just keeps lying and lying and lying—and probably will until the day he leaves office. This is a great summary of a man who really does not know how to speak the truth, and twists information around until it becomes lies and supports his opinions and ideas. It was interesting to read how the Washington Post fact checker staff looks at and researches what Trump says before pronouncing judgement—which is why they are probably looked upon so well by so many. This book can provide a good overview of the presidential lies (and those of his supporting, supporting him in whatever he does) and may help one understand who the man really is and what he stands for. It may also help one understand him better as decisions to vote in November grow closer. I received this book from NetGalley to read and review.
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